By Suzanne Wade

You don't have to be in the gem business to know that ruby, emerald, and sapphire are "The Big Three" of the gem world.

Just take a look at how often ruby, emerald, and sapphire surface in Western popular culture. Every 10-year-old knows that Dorothy wears ruby slippers on her way to the Wizard of Oz's Emerald City. Technology gurus write computer software in the "Ruby" programming language, or hire Sapphire Technologies to handle the company's IT needs. Visitors to Ireland talk about their trip to the Emerald Isle, while tourists in Boston visit a string of parks known as the Emerald Necklace.

You could also simply walk through the doors of a mall jewelry store. If they carry anything beyond diamond rings and gold chains, the odds are good it will be some type of ruby, emerald, or sapphire jewelry.

ABOVE: An emerald and diamond choker; photo courtesy Christie's. TOP: An antique sapphire and old mine diamond pin, photo courtesy Doyle New York; ear pendants with marquise- and pear-shaped Burmese rubies and round, brilliant-cut diamonds from Van Cleef & Arpels, Paris; photo courtesy Antiquorum Auctioneers.

The dominance of ruby, emerald, and sapphire in the colored gem market isn't a recent phenomenon. While other gemstones have been used for at least as long, the Big Three have held a special place in the hearts — and treasuries — of human beings for millennia. How did these three gems get such a hold over human desires?

"The roots of the Big Three go back in time as long as gemstones have been known and written about," says gem author and researcher Si Frazier. "The Big Three are stones that are well known. They have their leading place by historical prerogative."

Sapphire, ruby, and emerald had already claimed a place among human kind's valued treasures by the time Roman scholar Pliny the Elder wrote his encyclopedia of the natural world in the first century A.D. In his chapter on stones, Pliny describes gems that are clearly ruby, sapphire, and emerald, as well as examples of how these gems were being counterfeited by unscrupulous "gem" merchants.

But while Pliny is clearly familiar with what today we call the Big Three, it's equally clear that his terms for those gems — carbunculus (ruby), hyacinthos (sapphire), and smaragdus (emerald) — included a number of other gemstones of the same color. For example, Pliny refers to several types of "smaragdus," one of which was certainly emerald, while others must have been different varieties of green stones. "Carbunculus" probably included spinel as well as ruby, since the two were frequently confused right up until the science of gemology was developed in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Precisely when the stones we know today as ruby, sapphire, and emerald pushed aside the gems Pliny categorized them with is less certain.

"Like so many things in gemstones, it's kind of lost in the murky recesses of time," says Frazier. "But the distinction of harder stones versus the ones that were softer than quartz starts with Pliny."

It seems reasonable that the Big Three's hardness and beauty were responsible for moving them to the head of the class. "They're pretty, and they're extremely hard, so they wear fairly well," observes gem author and mineralogist Frederick Pough. "They're more enduring than softer stones, like opal and peridot: Sapphire and ruby have a hardness of nine. And emeralds are a beautiful green. While they're a bit fragile, what else do you have that's a pretty green?"

A turn-of-the-century emerald, diamond, and black onyx French dog collar that separates to form two bracelets; photo courtesy William Doyle Galleries.

Of course, not everyone recognized these qualities in the stones that were offered for sale, which opened the door for fakes. "Quartz being mistaken for diamond was so common in the 18th century that the Hapsburgs passed a law against collecting a certain type of quartz crystal that was being cut and polished and sold as diamond to the unwary," says Frazier. "There's a famous big spinel in the

British crown jewels that was thought to be a ruby for ages. There's also an instance where the French king needed to borrow money for one of his wars and put some rubies up for collateral with Venetian lapidaries." Apparently no one at the royal court was able to tell that some of the stones in the collection were spinel.

But not everyone was so easily taken in, notes Frazier. While the kings and queens of Europe couldn't distinguish between ruby and spinel, it's almost certain skilled gem cutters of the time knew the difference. "Although the chemistry [of gems] wasn't understood until 1800, and even then not too clearly, the properties of the stones were familiar to the people that actually worked them," says Frazier, noting that the Venetian lapidaries who received the French "rubies" were able to value them accurately. "Lapidaries knew there were two different stones, and that spinel, being not quite as hard, was not as valuable in dollars and cents terms. The knowledge that there were distinct differences between various stones, even though they were the same color, is something the professionals seem to have known long before science separated out the different types that we would think of gem species today."

The French king and his cohorts may not have been terribly concerned about accurate identification. Until very recently, just owning a prized gem like a ruby, emerald, or sapphire — or appearing to — gave the owner a certain status.

"Any gemstone was pretty rare and pretty special [before the 19th century]," says jewelry historian Elise Misiorowski, museum director at the Gemological Institute of America in Carlsbad, California. "In the 18th century, Spain had a corner on emeralds because they had the direct supply from Colombia. If there were others that filtered into other parts of Europe, they were very prized. Sapphires and rubies would have come from Southeast Asia, so they would have come a long route, either overland or around the Horns [of Africa or South America]. So the Big Three and diamonds were coming [into Europe] by this time, but there was by no means a lot of them."

A Cartier diamond and ruby necklace; photo courtesy Antiquorum Auctioneers.

In the 18th century, that rarity meant that gemstones in general — and ruby, emerald, sapphire, diamond, and pearl in particular — stayed almost exclusively in the coffers of the very wealthy.

"At the pinnacle of society, among royalty, diamonds, sapphires, rubies, and pearls were worn, but they didn't filter down," says Misiorowski. "There weren't too many middle classes: You were rich or you were pretty darn poor, so there was nothing really available [beyond gems for the wealthy]."

In the 19th century, that dichotomy began to weaken, as the industrial revolution changed the face of society and mass-produced jewelry became available to the growing middle class. While the very wealthy continued to flaunt their rubies and emeralds, the burgeoning demand for jewelry among the lower classes inspired the use of less expensive gems.

Turquoise, especially, became hugely popular in the early 1800s. "It was 'forget-me-not' blue, and there was a lot of symbolic significance worked into jewelry at that time," notes Misiorowski. "Every woman had a little bit of blue."

Interest in the new science of archaeology also spurred the use of other gems. "During the archaeological style, which took hold around 1850 until the end of the century, [the jewelry was] predominantly gold with pearls or carnelian," inspired by the jewelry of ages past, says Misiorowski. "They also used a lot of agate, either as cameos or intaglios, or as scarabs."

These fashions stretched right up into the upper levels of society, and even royalty sometimes opted for an archaeological-style fringe necklace instead of the classic string of pearls. But by that time, the Big Three had become entrenched not just as traditional jewels, but also as symbols of wealth and power.

"The turn of the century was a very wealthy time, and people were decking themselves out as an expression of wealth," says Misiorowski. "Showing off how much money your family had was accepted and expected. What we would consider ostentatious was just what you did if your family had money."

That meant if you could afford the most expensive gems — diamonds, rubies, pearls, emeralds, and sapphires — you bought them. "At the turn of the century, the two favorite gems were diamonds and pearls — two of the most expensive gems," says Misiorowski. "Rubies and sapphires were again very prized, but [fine quality] was still not [widely] available. If they were used, they were always surrounded by diamonds. If you had a suite of ruby [jewelry], it had a few very fine rubies and lots and lots of diamonds."

A platinum Art Deco necklace (circa 1925) with a large pendant in the Oriental flower vase motif designed from carved Colombian emeralds and round diamonds, with black enamel and emerald cabochon accents, from Mauboussin, Paris. Photo courtesy Antiquorum Auctioneers.

Rare as they were, new sources of ruby, emerald, and sapphire were making those long-valued gems more readily available. As the European empires expanded, they discovered new sources of diamond in South Africa, ruby in Myanmar (Burma), sapphire in India and Sri Lanka, and the long-lost Chivor emerald mine in Colombia. Other gemstones, including alexandrite and demantoid garnet, were also discovered and used widely in jewelry.

The wealthy bought them all. "One of [Edward VII's wife] Alexandra's favorite gems was amethyst, so she had suites of it," says Misiorowski. "But she also had rubies, sapphires, emeralds, pearls — you name it, she had it. So she just wore what she felt like wearing."

That era of flaunted opulence, which gave rise to both Edwardian and Art Nouveau styles, came to a precipitous halt with the arrival of World War I, as the appalling loss of life and then the Russian revolution put a damper on the desire to wear extravagant jewelry.

Rubies, sapphires, and emeralds returned in force in the Art Deco styles of the Roaring '20s, then disappeared again as the Depression and World War II dried up both the supply of fine gems and the money to buy them. The aquamarine, topaz, and citrine of the war years eventually gave way to ruby, sapphire, and diamond, as the newly prosperous expressed their patriotism in pins in red-white-and-blue color schemes.

"There's always a new style," says jewelry historian Joyce Jonas of Jonas & Associates. "The Edwardian look became old fashioned, and in came flapper Art Deco [jewelry]. Then came the stock crash, and all that went away. There were no stones from the Far East, and they were getting aquamarine, citrines, and semiprecious stones from South America, so the jewelry of the '40s was totally different."

But while other stones have enjoyed their time in the spotlight, ruby, emerald, and sapphire never seem to disappear entirely. The Big Three maintain their position with these customers because of their history as gems of status and wealth, because of the rarity and the expense of truly fine specimens, and because they are, simply, beautiful.

"If I had an enormous amount of money, I would buy an emerald. I love the color of an emerald — that real green of Colombian emeralds," confesses Jonas. "People will always gravitate to the finest, best, highest. That's historic, whether it's the emperor of Rome or the guys from Enron."

That aura persists even when the gem in question may be less beautiful and less durable than a gem material that appeared on the scene more recently. "The Big Three are the stones that are well known to the public, have been for centuries, and can be sold to people who have no knowledge of gemstones or mineralogy," observes Frazier.

"The average person out there sees red and thinks ruby," agrees gemologist Tom Elliott of Elliot Gem Lab in Bellevue, Washington. "[Ruby, sapphire, and emerald] are pretty embedded in the [Western] cultures. There's so much of it, and they're still finding new mines. It's not going to change. People will always buy ruby and sapphire."

As a result, the Big Three are likely to remain top dogs as long as "ruby," "emerald," and "sapphire" are words we conjure with. Until Dorothy trades in her ruby slippers for tourmaline pumps, the buying public will continue to buy rubies, hoping just a little of that magic will rub off on them.