eli5 What determines whether a gem is a sapphire, ruby, emerald, diamond, etc if those gems don’t necessarily have to be the most common thought color? For example, sapphires can be colors other than blue. What’s the difference between a red sapphire and a ruby?
In: 5800
The simplest answer is that the common gem names are applied to whatever people agree to call them. The distinction between a ruby and a sapphire is entirely arbitrary. Why is red corundum called a ruby? Because ruby meant red. Emerald meant a green gem and has been applied to malachite at times. Sapphire May have come from it being sacred to (what would be called) Saturn, probably wasn’t what the Greeks called sapphires, but instead was because they described sapphires as blue. Diamond was called such because it was super hard. All of those gem names came from either observable phenomena or cultural legacies. Not scientific consistency.
Our definitions of what constitutes a ruby ultimately comes down to organizing what different people called recurring groups of minerals. We could get rid of ruby entirely because it’s uniqueness comes from its color and that the name is popular. We could call it a red sapphire and it would probably be more accurate.
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