20 Glimmering Facts About Rare Gemstones You Didn’t Know

Night Pearls are a rare form of fluorite that is naturally luminescent, almost as tough as diamonds, and feature prominently in Chinese legends.

Rubies and Sapphires are the same minerals, Corundum. They differ with color due to small imperfections in the mineral.

Most blue topaz is created by taking natural topaz and exposing it to radiation, such as from a nuclear reactor, which changes its color to blue.

There is a type of garnet (a mineral used as a gemstone) called the "Anthill Garnet." Ants carry these gems up through their tunnels and deposit them at the top of the ground.

The Liberty Bell Ruby is a sculpture crafted from the world's largest mined ruby, discovered in east Africa in the 1950s. It weighs 4 pounds, is eight and a half thousand carats, and is sculpted into a miniature form of the Liberty Bell. It has 50 diamonds set in it and is valued at $2 million. It was stolen in 2011 and never recovered.

Painite is a gem mineral that is found only in Myanmar. It is so rare that until 2004 only two of them were ever cut into faceted gemstones.

The biggest amethyst geode, called the "Empress of Uruguay" is 3 meters tall and weighs more than 2 tons.

Olympic Australis is the largest opal ever found. It is valued at AUD $2,500,000. It weighs around 7.6 pounds and it consists of 99% gem opal.

The El-Dorado Topaz, which weighs a whopping 31,000 carats (6.2 kg or 13.67 lbs) currently holds the crown as the largest faceted gemstone in the world. Originally discovered in 1984 in mineral-rich Minas Gerais, Brazil, the pre-cut El-Dorado crystal tipped the scales at a mind-boggling 37 kg (81.6 lbs). It belongs to the British Royal Collection.

There is a gemstone called Alexandrite, that will change colors, usually from green to red, based on whether it's viewed under natural or artificial light.