They look relatively similar and can be confused, but what’s the real difference between red beryl and ruby?
The biggest difference between red beryl and ruby is the base composition: rubies are composed of corundum, while red beryl is composed of… Well, beryl. The latter is also much rarer and more valuable owing to its scarcity. Rubies are also much harder, more resistant gemstones.
Read on to learn more about these gemstones and their individual attributes.
Red vs Red
Where gemstones are concerned, there are a few that everybody is aware of. These tend to be the ‘top three’ colored jewels, and an accompaniment of assorted other stones.
There’s the emerald, ruby, and sapphire, and then diamond, amethyst, and topaz. These jewels make up the most common stones in the world, and they’re relatively easy to come by.
Although diamonds are the most popular, they’re by no means rare – the colored stones beat them easily on the scarcity scale. It’s a well-known fact that the rarer something is, the more expensive it becomes.
This fact can be clearly explained by bringing the red beryl into play. It’s almost a certainty that the average person hasn’t heard of red beryl at all, and that’s a notion driven primarily by its intense rarity.
It’s said that for every one-hundred and fifty thousand gem-quality diamonds, one red beryl is mined. Therefore, out of every one million diamonds, you’ll have just seven red beryl stones.
By comparison, two-carat red beryl is as rare as a forty-carat diamond, and the largest cut red beryl known to man is just eight carats. To put that into perspective, the largest cut diamond was more than three-thousand carats.
Rubies are rarer than diamonds but they don’t come close to red beryl in terms of scarcity. While ruby can command a relatively high price on the jewel market, it can’t even scratch the surface of red beryl.
This is the first huge difference between the two stones – red beryl is infinitely rarer than ruby.
The base composition of each stone also marks a massive difference between them. Rubies are composed of corundum, the same material that makes up sapphires.
However, red beryl is composed of beryl or beryllium. This element is also what emeralds are made from, and it’s a much weaker element than corundum.
While ruby is a seriously resistant stone, rated a nine on the Mohs scale, the red beryl only receives a seven to eight rating. The latter is evermore susceptible to damage, scratches, and inclusions.
The Journey of the Gemstone
The journey of beryl as a type of gemstone can be traced back to the Romans, Greeks, and even Egyptians. The latter were known to have mined green beryl – emeralds – as far back as 1500 BCE.
However, red beryl wouldn’t be discovered for another couple of thousand years, owing to the location in which it occurs. Red beryl is found exclusively in the ‘Wah Wah Mountains’ in Utah, and although the area had been settled for some ten-thousand years, the first red beryl wasn’t recorded until 1905.
Conversely, rubies have been mentioned throughout history, as far back as 200 BC. They’ve been used to decorate dwellings, jewelry, clothing, and even weapons for centuries upon centuries.
The history of the ruby is much richer than the red beryl for this very reason. There are countless ‘famous’ rubies, but almost no famous or iconic red beryl stones.
For example, there’s The Liberty Bell Ruby, a four-pound stone mined in South Africa in the fifties. It’s the world’s largest mined ruby, and was stolen in a heist in 2011 – it has never been recovered.
Then there’s The DeLong Star Ruby, a unique and intensely beautiful stone that was uncovered in the 1930s. It’s currently kept in the Natural History Museum in New York, but it too was subject to a heist.
In 1964, three incredible gems were stolen from the museum in a massive heist. They were all recovered and returned to the museum, where they’ve remained since.
However, the future of red beryl is as slim as its history, as known sources are close to depletion. As time goes on, red beryl areas will likely be completely exhausted, and the value of the stone will skyrocket.
It took red beryl around twenty million years to form, and one hundred years to be completely mined from the earth.