Opal – Gem Junkies

Opal Part Two- White Man In A Hole

We are ready for part two on Opals. In this episode, we head to the south, the southeast of South- Australia! We talk about opal types, miners, markets, and kangaroos. So, grab your breaky (as any Aussie would say) and join us!

Listen to the episode

Brecken: That was hilarious Livy. I called him boo. I said, “You got it boo.” And Livy, our little two year old, goes, “You got it boo!”

Do you need to sneeze? You’re freaking me out with your face. What do you need to do?

Jonathan: So… I hate saying so.

Brecken: I got this, boo.

Hi, it’s Brecken

Jonathan: and Jonathan

Brecken: from Gem Junkies and we’re back!

Jonathan: Welcome to episode three.

Brecken: Australian opal.

Jonathan: Part two of opal

Brecken: part two of the opal series. Last week, we talked about the world of opal. This week we’re gonna delve a little bit further into Australian opal.

We did have a question that came up about opal care.

Jonathan: Yes. opal care, which is a very common question that we didn’t talk about as a durability. And so opal care and durability go hand in hand. And so opal care, one of the first questions that we always get asked is, “Should you oil your opals?” And

Brecken: Please don’t oil your opal.

Jonathan: Do not oil your opals, all oil does is it attaches to the surface of opal. And then it attracts dust and dust is the same hardness as quartz, which is harder than the opal.

Brecken: It’s a seven. Opal’s five and a half to six and a half. You can see where this is going.

Jonathan: It scratches and abrades the surface of your opal and will make it look ugly. So the only time you’d ever store opal in oil as if you were to store it like in a safety deposit box, Loose.

So anytime it’s a finished piece, you shouldn’t store it in anything, but just in air. And then also care of an opal the best way to clean an opal, a piece of opal jewelry is with,

Brecken: Warm, soapy water

Jonathan: and a toothbrush.

Brecken: Yep. Soft, soft bristle toothbrush,

Jonathan: soft bristled toothbrush.

This week has been very busy for us.

Brecken: We are getting ready for the JCK luxury show. It starts next week. So we’ve been busy bees.

Jonathan: Yep. Busy bees, getting everything organized, all of our beautiful pieces finished. And so it’s been very, very busy.

Brecken: Ready for what? Eight hot days in the desert sun.

Jonathan: Something like that.

Brecken: Except we never leave the Mandalay Bay Convention Center.

Jonathan: That’s very true. We never get to see the light of day.

Brecken: No, it’s through the big windows.

Jonathan: Okay. Through windows.

Brecken: Yeah. There you go.

Jonathan: We do have one correction. I said last time that there were only two places that black opal was found,

Brecken: Jonathan misspoke,

Jonathan: which was Nevada and Australia. But there are some black opals from Ethiopia that are not died.

Brecken: Thank you, Jonathan.

Jonathan: So let’s talk first about the different types of opal that come out of Australia. And along with each of those, we can talk about where they come from. So where do you wanna start? You wanna start with your traditional light opal or do you wanna start with black opal?

Where do you wanna start?

Brecken: I wanna start with, black opal.

Jonathan: Okay. The most expensive of all. Black opal is called black opal, not because it’s black, but because the base color is dark versus the base color being light.

Brecken: And why is the base color black?

Jonathan: The base color is dark due to an addition of iron as a trace element. And that’s what gives black opal it’s dark base color. But black opal isn’t just black. It’s a continuum from light opal all the way to black with all the different grays in between.

Brecken: So doesn’t iron also color Mexican? It gives it the orange and red color.

Jonathan: Correct.

Brecken: And it also colors the black, correct? Oh, Iron is a tricky thing.

Jonathan: Iron is a tricky thing. It’s a lot more iron, which is why it’s black. Maybe if it was less iron, it would be more like Mexican maybe, but it’s also a different formation. Australia is all sedimentary, whereas we talked about Mexican being volcanic. So I think it also has a little bit to do with that.

Brecken: So where does black opal come from?

Jonathan: Black opal comes from Lightning Ridge, Australia.

Brecken: I knew that answer.

Jonathan: Of course you did. And where is Lightning Ridge in Australia?

Brecken: New South Wales.

Jonathan: That’s correct. New South Wales.

Brecken: It is a short airplane ride from Sydney, Australia. What about an eight hour car drive from Sydney?

Jonathan: Yeah, probably something like that.

Brecken: Jonathan and I flew a plane there. I flew a plane there with the assist of a pilot, but

Jonathan: So you rode in a plane to Lightning Ridge?

Brecken: No, he let me fly in the air. I got to kind of tilt the wings and turn the plane. And when we were landing in lightning Ridge, it was the most beautiful epic scene landing a plane in the Outback. There was the cutest little kangaroo that jumped in front of the plane on the landing strip. And I thought this was just the most magical thing. And the pilot, like almost crapped himself, because it could have been really bad if we hit the kangaroo.

Jonathan: Yeah, there was a bunch of kangaroos and wallabies that jump alongside the airplanes as they land and take off. So it’s kind of very picturesque.

Brecken: It is, but also very dangerous. Don’t hit, don’t hit a kangaroo with an airplane.

Jonathan: Or a car.

Brecken: Or a car, both dude. They’re dumb animals.

Jonathan: Yeah. They’re not bright. They’re a lot like deer here.

Brecken: No, but they’re worse than deer because I don’t think deer run towards headlights. I feel like kangaroos do. They just- remember when we were on that island? Phillips Island, they just came out of nowhere. Yeah. And we’re like, “Cars coming. Let’s let’s check it out.”

Jonathan: They’re more curious I think.

Brecken: But they’re so cute.

Jonathan: Very cute. And they are kinda like dogs. Like we went to an animal park there and they would lay down, they’d be laying down sunning themselves and you’d come and scratch their bellies, just like a dog. And they’d, it was they’re pretty cute.

Brecken: Happiest day of my life.

Jonathan: It was pretty, pretty fun.

Brecken: Cuddling with kangaroos and koalas.

Jonathan: Koalas are also quite cuddly.

Brecken: All right. We digress go back to black opal. Jonathan,

Jonathan: What else is there to talk about? So it was first discovered the field in Lightning Ridge was first discovered in 1905 by kangaroo shooters.

Brecken: Ooh.

Jonathan: So we link right back.

Brecken: So the Ridge full circle.

Jonathan: Yeah. So that’s where the best black opals come from. There are a few black opals that come from other places in Australia, but it’s the primary source.

Brecken: What, Mintabie has blacks or is it Winton?

Jonathan: Yeah. So Mintabie definitely has some black opal as well. And there’s a little bit that comes out of Coober Pedy once in a while as well, but mostly from Lightning Ridge.

Brecken: Okay. One thing I thought was super interesting about Lightning Ridge in general was it’s just full of crazy people.

Jonathan: I mean, you have to be crazy to live in the middle of the desert eight hours from the next major city.

Brecken: But there was this miner who made himself teeth out of opal. Do you remember that? That was insane.

Jonathan: That was pretty cool. He had dentures that were opal dentures. Yeah. I don’t think they’d be very good for eating.

Brecken: No, probably not.

Jonathan: They would break pretty teeth.

Brecken: I don’t know how hard are teeth?

Jonathan: Teeth are pretty hard.

Brecken: Are they?

Jonathan: Yeah, I don’t know. We’ll have to look up. “On the Mohs scale what are teeth?”

Next let’s talk about the more traditional light opal, which is a large, there’s a large area in Australia that you can find light opal everywhere from Andamooka and Coober Pedy, Mintabie, Lambina, which are all in South Australia, north of Adelaide. And then you also get over to like White Cliffs and that way more into New South Wales. It also has light opal.

The bulk of light opal is found in Coober Pedy. And Coober Pedy in Aborigini means,

Brecken: “white man in a hole.”

Jonathan: Right. And that’s what it is. There’s a bunch of holes and the miners actually live underground because the summer temperatures can get so crazy, crazy hot there that nobody wants to live out there.

Brecken: Oddly enough, I have watched a house Hunter’s international, where they were looking. At homes underground in Coober Pedy. It was crazy. He was a miner. There you go. He moved his whole family there. Yeah.

Jonathan: So there’s quite a region that covers light opal, which is the more traditional.

Brecken: And we kind of talked about it last week, but Australia is an ancient seabed. So that’s how a lot of the opal in Australia formed. The silica, rich water percolating down and forming those bands of opal.

Jonathan: So you get a lot of, especially outta Coober Pedy, you get a lot of shell opal as we call it. Which is where the organic material of the shell disintegrates and the opal replaces it. So you get actual sea shells and opal fossils. So that’s something that’s kind of cool.

Brecken: We have belamite tubes, which are the internal structure of a squid that have been opalized that we’ve made little bar necklaces out of.

Jonathan: The Belamites are really cool and very popular right now.

Brecken: We also had the most amazing fivefold clam specimen that Jonathan sold.

Jonathan: I’m good at selling.

Brecken: Broke my heart. It was so beautiful. Did they make that into a piece of jewelry or keep it as a specimen?

Jonathan: Made it into a piece of jewelry. She made it into a beautiful pendant, beautiful.

Brecken: Talking about light opal. We really got heavy in Australian light opal in what, the 70’s or 80’s. Frank went over to Hong Kong to purchase it.

Jonathan: He just didn’t know anyone in Hong Kong, had never been to China. He flew over to Hong Kong, opened up the yellow pages and started going through opal cutters. And that’s how he got into the Australian opal business.

Brecken: I think it’s an interesting story. Why most of the Australian opal was being cut in Hong Kong at the time. They were extremely good at cutting Jade.

Jonathan: Yeah. They were great Jade cutters and had a lot of practice.

Brecken: Jade is mostly cut into cabochons just like opal is. So it made sense that the material would be cut there with the skilled labor that was there.

We talked a lot last week about kind of the Roman views on opal, but we didn’t talk about the Aboriginal Australian views on opal and their stories about it because the English were not the first people to discover opal in Australia. Correct?

Jonathan: Right. The Aboriginals also discovered opal and they have their own stories about opal and how it came about is they believe that the Maker came down to Earth. And where he landed,

Brecken: where he walked, everywhere he walked it turned to opal. There’s also a story that what opals are rainbows trapped in the soil, the Maker threw rainbows down and trapped them in the soil. And, and that’s what opals are.

Jonathan: So one of the, one of the Australian Aboriginal dream time stories as told by June Barker of lightning Ridge,

voice over: In the Aurelia country, the dream time creator came down to earth in a giant rainbow. He gathered together all the tribes and said he would return when he thought they were wise enough to carry out his plan to have peace on earth. On the Stony ridges, where the rainbow had rested, there was a great area of rocks and pebbles. Next morning, when the sun rose and shine his light on that spot, the rocks and pebbles flashed and glittered in the sun, all the color of the rainbow that had given them birth. Red, orange, green, yellow, blue, violet. These were the first opals.

Brecken: So beautiful Jonathan. The Australians love their opal. They’re opal crazy over there.

Jonathan: Opal crazy.

Brecken: So we have talked about black opal where it’s mined, light or white opal and where that is mined. And also there is boulder opal.

Jonathan: Yeah. Boulder opal, which is my favorite. And boulder opal is found in Queensland in quite a large area right in the center of the Great Artesian Basin.

Brecken: And boulder opal is opal that is still connected with its host rock. Its host rock is an ironstone. So it’s a really hard material, and it’s really hard to remove that opal to get a solid band of opal. So you’re left with opal and ironstone.

Jonathan: Right. You have very thin seams of opal and they’re still attached to ironstone, which is like a petrified sandstone. It’s usually brown in color, brown to light brown. And it really helps just like, black opal the color really stand out. So boulder opal has great play of color and really strong, vibrant colors.

Brecken: Yeah. I remember the first time I saw boulder opal, I thought, “What the heck is this stuff?” I don’t even know what this is. And you, when you see, sometimes it’s more of an opal matrix. Which is just very little opal material and mostly a brown stone.

Jonathan: And which also can be interesting. It’s small veins of opal all throughout the ironstone. And so it looks like little lightning bolts, or you could sometimes see pictures in it. So those are much less expensive than with the full opal face, but they make really fun jewelry.

Brecken: Yeah. When that comes from Yowah

Jonathan: and that’s where you have

Brecken: A little like pocket yeah of silica.

Jonathan: A little pocket of opal. And so when it comes out, it comes out looking almost like an egg, or a nut. And then when you crack it, when you cut it apart, it’s got a, just a perfect little round pocket of opal in the center of the brown ironstone. So you call it a Yowah nut.

Brecken: A Yowah nut looks like a little nut that you cracked open, almost like a geode, right? Kinda same idea, but full of opal instead of amethyst or quarts.

My favorite boulder opal material is Koroit as the, Aussie’s say “cr-oye-t.” yeah. It comes from a place called Koroit or “Cuh-row-it” is how we would say it in American English. You see pictures and patterns in the stone. It’s almost like a painting, like an artist took it and painted a picture. It’s really beautiful.

Jonathan: Yeah. It’s awesome.

Brecken: The only word I can say in Aussie English is “bolduh.” “Boulduh” for boulder opal. Oh, I can’t even say opal it’s like,

Jonathan: Yeah, we’re definitely not Aussies.

Brecken: We’re not Aussies. And I practice every time we meet with our suppliers, I always say, “Okay, say boulder for me.” And they’ll say “bolduh.” and so I’ll have to repeat it like 15 times so I can say it until the next time I meet them. “Throw some shrimp on the barbie.” No, I didn’t get it.

Jonathan: Just stop. You’re you’re

Brecken: “I’ll have a tinny.”

Jonathan: I think you’re too California girl for an Aussie accent.

Brecken: Maybe I just can’t get it. I don’t know what it is. They shorten everything though. So my name’s Brecken as most of you know, and growing up, my siblings would call me Brecky and that is the exact word the Australians use for breakfast. “Let’s have some Brecky.”

Jonathan: So the first time we went everywhere, she thought the signs were all,

Brecken: they were all for me!

Jonathan: They were all for you.

Brecken: “Brecky served here.”

Jonathan: She was welcomed in Australia every morning. and the interesting thing about Australia is they set up opal mining to be artisanal forever. And so there isn’t these huge, large mines like there is for like diamonds or for tanzanite, or anything like that is that you only get a small plot.

Brecken: You only get a small claim.

Jonathan: That, that small claim. And so the only times that you really get a whole lot more then that is like, if a bunch of miners get together and work a plot together, but that’s pretty much it. And so they’re all pretty artisanal and small mines. And that’s why you don’t find a lot of opal miners anymore.

Brecken: It’s hard work.

Jonathan: It’s hard work. And corporations can’t go in there and mine the opal. And so it’s kind of a dying breed.

Brecken: Yeah. We, we can’t buy opal from just one person. We don’t have one source of opal. We probably buy our opal from over a hundred different miners.

Jonathan: Probably off and on and over the years, definitely around a hundred. And the majority of it from the Chinese because the Chinese do more buying of opal rough than anyone else, and cutting and all that kind of stuff. So we buy a lot in Hong Kong and China of opal.

Brecken: Most of our boulder is not being cut in Hong Kong. Most of that’s being cut in Australia.

Jonathan: Yeah. That’s the exception is the boulder, which

Brecken: They actually keep a lot of the nicer stones in Australia and cut them in Australia. Especially in boulder. And also I think some of your bigger light and your bigger blacks, and then they send more calibrated, maybe more commercial pieces to be cut in China.

The opal market has changed drastically, I would say in the last 30 years. It used to be extremely profitable to mine, opal, and then it got much harder to do. There was more and more prospecting and not as much material available. And I think in the early two thousand’s, when gold prices went like through the roof, remember during the recession and so did oil. A lot of your opal miners retired or moved to mining gold and oil.

Jonathan: And their kids saw how hard work it was or they didn’t have kids. And so you don’t have really that second and third generation doesn’t exist so much. And so you’re left with not only of it being more difficult to find, because they’re having to go deeper. And most of the easy stuff I think has already been found. But you also just don’t have as many people mining.

Brecken: When we were in Lightning Ridge, there was an opal mine that I, I would not go in. I stayed up with the kangaroos.

Jonathan: It wasn’t scary.

Brecken: It was! So I am one: extremely afraid of Heights and it is just like a pit. How many yards or feet would you say Jonathan, down to the bottom of that pit?

Jonathan: I think it was like 20 to 30 meters, which is three feet, three inches per meter.

Brecken: So 60, 70. I’m gonna round up and say a hundred feet down into this hole.

Jonathan: Yeah. And there’s no ocean in Australia. So it’s like, you’ve got like this metal culvert. So like a metal pipe that is at the top of the thing. And then they had these sections, like six foot sections of swinging ladders. So they weren’t like strapped together.

Brecken: No, they were all joint. And just like, hang like. Picture metal clothes hangers just dangling off of each other. And that’s what you’re climbing down.

Jonathan: And no ropes, no gear.

Brecken: No. You had a hard hat though.

Jonathan: Yeah. Hard hat. So if you fell,

Brecken: I wasn’t going down the hole. So I just stayed up there all by myself. It was really peaceful. I had a moment in the Outback.

Jonathan: It was, it was pretty cool though. Underneath us they showed us around and showed us where, you know, they had taken this much out of this part of the mine and that much out of that. And this was a major find. And then showed us how they worked the mine with, you know, small equipment underground. And then they have like a bucket that pulls it back up to the surface.

Brecken: They had all these timber logs right. Holding up the ceiling. I didn’t go down, but I saw amazing pictures.

Jonathan: So they have all these just big timbers that were, that hold up the ceiling and keep the mine from collapsing in.

Brecken: Good thing. And they prospect by drilling holes everywhere. So they’ll just kind of go in to an area that they think might have opal and they’ll just drill down and take a core sample out, look at the core sample and see how much material is actually there. And if it’s worth digging a hole and actually mining that material out.

That was almost as bad as the drunk Brazilian guy.

Jonathan: No, the drunk Brazilian guy was way worse. Drunker. I didn’t even go down that line because they told me I could rip my feet off. So the emerald mines in Brazil are much scarier than the Australian opal mines.

And we did talk a little bit about opal triplets from Idaho, but there’s also a lot of opal doublets and triplets out of Australia. Sometimes the seams of opal are too thin to make solids. And so that’s when you take the thin piece of opal and you glue it together with ironstone and that makes your opal doublets. Or when you add a glass, or quartz, or a Sapphire top, that’s when you get a triplet.

Brecken: We do a lot in opal doublet. It’s become a really popular stone for designers to work with.

Jonathan: Yeah, it’s a great, it’s definitely the best bang for your buck in opal is opal doublet, you get so much more color and so much more vibrancy.

Brecken: It gives you almost the, it gives you the color of a black opal, really. That’s because it gives you that really dark base behind the light opal and it really makes the stones pop and you can get a pretty large size of it for not very much money. A few hundred dollars a carat where your finest black would be. Thousands and thousands of dollars a carat. I think the most expensive black opal I saw was $200,000 for the stone. Yeah, there was, and it was red pattern with Harlequin, like your picture-perfect black opal.

Jonathan: But there’s definitely even more expensive ones than that.

Brecken: I’m sure. Yeah. stones with a little more provenance. Bigger stones.

Jonathan: Bigger. Yeah. And that’s the thing about opal is that, you know, you can, they come from tiny, tiny to very, very large. I mean, we’ve seen ones as, you know, as big as my arm, especially in Boulder opal, and then, you know, in light opal, I’ve seen as big as my fist. And so all solid light opals, that’s kind of a cool thing about opal is you do get some very large pieces.

Brecken: A little bit showier than your other gemstones. Cause you can’t, I mean, what’s the biggest Sapphire you could get. I mean, you can get like 20, 30, 40 carat stones, but they’re not as big as like a hundred carat opal and you can find a hundred carat opals out there fairly easily compared to a 40 carat Sapphire.

Jonathan: Correct.

Brecken: All right. I think this wraps up our opal series.

Jonathan: Yep. Our two part opal series.

Brecken: If you have any more questions on opal, give us a shout out at [email protected] and we’ll be happy to answer your questions.

Jonathan: So, what are we gonna talk about next week?

Brecken: Ruby.

Jonathan: Ruby the King of all gemstones.

Brecken: The King of gemstones! We’re leaving the queen and going to the king.

Jonathan: Yeah, go to the king first. And so we’ll be talking about Ruby. So if you have any questions about Ruby, feel free to leave a comment or shoot us an email. And let us know your questions ahead of time, or if there’s any other topics that you want to hear, definitely let us know so that we can put those on plan.

Brecken: We can plan into the future. I think we’re also planning on doing one in Vegas.

Jonathan: Yeah. We’ll definitely do a recording in Vegas. And so that will be not next week, but the week after we’ll be releasing the one that we do in Vegas.

Brecken: It’s just a party.

Jonathan: It’s just a party.

Brecken: It’s just a bunch of jewelers getting together, having a laugh.

Jonathan: Thank you for listening to our third episode of Gem Junkies.

Brecken: Gem-Gem-Gem Junkies!

I’ve gotta give some content!

If you like what you heard today or any of the other episodes, make sure you subscribe to Gem Junkies on SoundCloud, iTunes, or Google play and make sure you rate us if you like us.

Jonathan: Anything you put on there, she records. It has a chance of getting on the air. It does after last week, anything can be on there.

Brecken: Anything goes.

October 6

Opals, Queen Victoria, & A Sassy Shoulder

What do Opals, Queen Victoria, and a sassy shoulder have in common? Find out as we introduce Part One of our Opal series. In this episode, we discuss the origination of Opals, the science behind their creation, stories and fables from this ancient gemstone, and a brief look at all of the regions producing this fabulous rainbow gem.

Transcription

Jonathan: I think everybody loves opal. It’s the queen of all gems.

Brecken: Ah, yep. So say the Romans… and they’re dead.

I didn’t have my coffee, so I’m a little off my game.

New Speaker: All right. You guys are ready.

Jonathan: This is the hardest part. Starting. Starting is hard.

Brecken: It’s me.

Jonathan: Wewe

Brecken: Hi, this is Brecken

Jonathan: and Jonathan

Brecken: of Gem Junkies. Are you ready?

Jonathan: I am ready

Brecken: podcast number two,

Jonathan: podcast, number two.

Brecken: We’re like big kids now.

Jonathan: Yeah.

Brecken: We’ve had our first podcast.

Jonathan: Yeah. That now it’s training wheels off. So we got gymnastics tonight, right?

Brecken: Yes. We, Jonathan and I, have twin two-year-olds, girls, and they are just the most precious, loving, amazing little girls. Right, Jonathan?

Jonathan: Yeah. Or they can be wild, crazy two-year-olds, because they are two.

Brecken: And so we go to gymnastics every Tuesday night. And yeah, they enjoy it. They get their wiggles out.

Jonathan: Get your wiggles out.

Brecken: So this week we’re doing opal, which we’re gonna do a whole series on, but first we wanted to touch back on last week. Our Lotus garnet episode.

Jonathan: Yeah. Thank you for all the very nice comments. And we got some emails with some questions, some we will answer directly, but one of the ones that came up that I thought was really good is where does Lotus Garnet come from in Tanzania?

Brecken: Right! It is from the Mahenge region in Tanzania

Jonathan: and the Mahenge region is in central Tanzania. Kind of south central versus like Tanzanite

Brecken: and mint garnet

Jonathan: Mint garnet, tsavorite that all comes from Northern Tanzania, right near the Kenya border, near Sabo National Park, which is how tsavorite got its name. So thanks for writing in and feel free to ask any questions that you have about this week’s topic of opal.

And you can write us at [email protected].

Brecken: Perfect. And so let’s talk about opal.

Jonathan: So opal is very special to me. It’s how my dad started the company in 1973 as a longhaired hippie college student, just as a summer job. He went up to Spencer, Idaho, and mined opals and then brought them home and cut them in the back room of a single wide trailer and boom there’s how Idaho Opal and Gem got founded.

Brecken: Yeah. So our name, our original company name, was Idaho Opal and Gem Corporation. And about mid-nineties, we switched it to Parlé, which is how you know us now. Our original name traces us back to our roots, our origin. Yes, our blood,

Jonathan: our blood roots.

Brecken: Jonathan was sorting opals in diapers. Right?

Jonathan: Definitely not.

Brecken: Yeah. At least diapers. Maybe you were potty trained early. I don’t know.

I think the best place to start with opal is probably its formation, like how it’s made. So do you wanna take that away, Jonathan?

Jonathan: No.

Brecken: You want me to be the scientist this week?

Jonathan: Yep.

Brecken: Okay. So opal is formed when silica-rich water percolates down through the soil and ends up against a hard surface that it can no longer percolate through. And then it forms bands of silica, which is your opal. Oh, go ahead, Jonathan.

Jonathan: And so the silica spheres stack on top of each other. If you looked under really high magnification, you’d see a bunch of like marbles all stacked up in a pan. And if you shook them and got ’em arranged all evenly, that would form precious opal. If they were all mixed all up and all different sizes and all over the place that would give you common opal, which has no play of color.

Brecken: Right. So the difference between common opal, which is extremely common, and precious opal is the fact that it has the phenomenon of play of color. And it’s actually where the light enters the gemstone and kind of wraps around the silica sphere and comes back to your eye with pretty color.

Jonathan: Yeah. So it’s one step past a prism. So most of your gemstones are like a prism. The light enters the gemstone, it bounces around inside, and it comes back to your eye.

With opal, it’s one step past that and it actually breaks it down to its spectral colors. And so that’s where you get all the different colors based on the size of the micron’s spheres, which you end up at 0.2 of a micron for blue, 0.25 for green, and 0.32 for red.

Brecken: Right. And red is considered the most prized color in an opal. It’s the rarest color.

Jonathan: And therefore the most expensive.

Brecken: And therefore the most expensive. We love those reds.

Jonathan: Yeah, reds are definitely the best.

Brecken: So the major sources for opal nowadays are obviously Australia, which has been probably the major source for the past few hundred years, I would say. Then Mexico for fire opal, and then Ethiopia, and also a little bit from Brazil too. The US has opal. It’s how our company started. My father-in-law Frank started mining opal in the 70s in Spencer, Idaho. But it’s in really thin veins of opal and it’s in the really hard host material.

Jonathan: Yeah. So it’s in rhyolite and it’s right up by Yellowstone National Park. And it was formed by the same formation that formed Yellowstone. And so because of the rhyolite, they have to blast out all the opal. And we all know with a gemstone that’s the same hardness as glass, blasting anything doesn’t do very well on that kind of material.

Brecken: So you end up with really thin seams and you have to make triplets out of them, which is where they glue either ironstone or an onyx backing to it, and then cap it with quartz or a sapphire crystal or glass. Depending on the caliber of the triplet.

There’s also opal in Nevada.

Jonathan: There is opal in Nevada. There’s black opal in Nevada, which is the only other place where there’s really black opal other than Australia.

Brecken: So it comes from a petrified forest, right? So the opal, the silica actually went in and replaced the trees. Kind of filled in that fossil.

Jonathan: Yeah. The organic material fell apart and the silica replaced it.

Brecken: Right. And that happens in Australia too, because it was an ancient seabed. So I got to visit Nessie when we went to Sydney, Australia, she’s a dinosaur that’s all opal.

Jonathan: Yeah. So it’s like mostly common opal with just small amounts of play of color. But I think you’re jumping ahead a little that’s actually,

Brecken: I know. I like Nessie.

Jonathan: Oh, you love Australia cuz that’s where it has the most opal.

Brecken: That’s true.

Jonathan: So we should probably talk about where was opal first found. Was it A- China, B- Slovakia, or C- Idaho?

Brecken: I’m gonna say B. Slovakia.

Jonathan: That’s right. It was first found in Slovakia.

Brecken: What did I win?

Jonathan: The pleasure of being right.

Brecken: I do like that. So opal gets its name from an ancient Roman word “opalus.”

Jonathan: Yes. Which means “a change in color.”

Brecken: All right. So they probably saw the play of color that we all see in opal. We don’t need much, I guess, human intervention to make it beautiful. Really, most of your opal is just polished. It’s not cut like a diamond or a Sapphire to bring sparkling liveliness to the stone. So if you think in ancient days, they didn’t have the cutting equipment that we have now. So. Your diamonds, your rubies, your sapphires, your emeralds were either mostly cabochons or the facets were really poorly done, which is why opal, I think was such a special stone to them. They kind of glow from within, so you don’t, you don’t need a lot to make them beautiful.

A lot of people think that opal is unlucky, right Jonathan?

Jonathan: Yep. That’s a common thing, but I think they’re very wrong.

Brecken: They are wrong. Opal used to be considered an incredibly lucky stone. A lot of the ancients believed that it was incredibly good luck that it gave the wearer the gift of prophecy, that it could heal you. And that it, in some terms had like these mystical powers. It wasn’t until. Sir Walter Scott, is that who it was?

Jonathan: Yep, Sir Walter Scott wrote Anne of Geierstein. And Anne of Geierstein was a super popular book at the time as popular as Harry Potter, which is kind of interesting since the main character was

Brecken: Hermione!

Jonathan: Yes. Hermione,

Brecken: just like in Harry Potter.

Jonathan: And what was so special about Hermione?

Brecken: Well, Hermione was beautiful and the villagers did not like it, they just didn’t think this woman could possibly be this beautiful. And she was poised and had grace and she always wore. “She always wore.” She always wore this amazing opal and happened to catch the eye of the King.

And the villagers didn’t really like this very much. They thought there was something odd about this beautiful woman that just happened to come into town. And she wore an amazing opal that just seemed to glow and give the woman magical powers.

Jonathan: Yeah. She was an outsider and they all thought she was a witch.

Brecken: Of course, if you don’t like something a woman does, she’s a witch.

Anyway, she ends up having a baby with a king, and the king and she get married. They have a baby and the villagers were like, “We’ve never seen her in church. Why doesn’t she go to church?” So they go to church to have the baby baptized and one clever villager decides they’re gonna throw some water, holy water, on the opal. And she just drops down. Right. She doesn’t die, she just collapses.

Jonathan: She collapses and then they take her back to her room and they close the door. And then when they open the door again, she’s gone.

Brecken: She’s gone, she’s disappeared and never heard from again.

Jonathan: Yeah. And what’s what I, think’s funny about this is that everyone latched onto this when this was like less than one-tenth of the book, the whole rest of the book as you can tell, it’s called Anne of Geierstein. So it’s really about Anne of Geierstein.

Brecken: Not Hermione and her opal.

Jonathan: Not Hermione and her opal, which is only one little tiny part of the book. And so, you know, it’s a wonderful tale and really contains nothing to indicate that Scott meant to represent opal as unlucky.

Brecken: About the time that Sir Walter Scott wrote this book, the Australians were discovering opal. And Queen Victoria happened to have a vested interest in Australia. And as they did in most of the world, at that time, she wanted opal to be the prized gemstone that it should be. This is why she made it acceptable to hand out or give opals as gifts. Right. So you can receive opal as a gift.

Jonathan: Yeah. So, that’s where it came from that you can’t buy opal for yourself, but it’s okay if it comes as a gift.

Brecken: Right. But she even had a little slip-up with an opal broach, right?

Jonathan: She did.

Brecken: During her coronation, she was wearing an opal broach. That was, I don’t know, clasping something together. And the broach broke.

Jonathan: Shoddy craftsmanship on the broach. I don’t know what this has to do with opal.

Brecken: It has nothing to do with the opal, but it revealed a little too much skin than was acceptable at the time. So I think it was just her shoulder, but anyway, it didn’t help opal’s luck.

Jonathan: Nope. That didn’t help either.

Brecken: All right. So we all agree that opal is an extremely, extremely lucky stone and a beautiful stone. Who doesn’t like opal?

Jonathan: So throughout history, there’s been a lot more about opal being lucky than unlucky, but there’s definitely some more recent history about it being unlucky, which is why I think that has tended to stick in the general population today.

Brecken: So I think it’s important to kind of delve into the sources of opal that we’re seeing on the market right now.

Jonathan: We have the primary sources of where opal is actually coming from right now would be Australia, number one, Ethiopia, number two, Mexico, number three, and a little bit from Brazil, number four.

So those are probably your top four sources that are in current production.

Brecken: I think the Brazilian material is really cool. It’s got a pattern that’s called rain fire.

Jonathan: Yeah. It’s like little confetti all throughout the opal.

Brecken: You can pick up a piece of Brazilian opal and know it like right off the bat, just because of its pattern.

Jonathan: When it has that pattern.

Brecken: Yeah. When it has that pattern and it’s also incredibly stable.

Jonathan: Very stable material. Very little of it ever crazes or dehydrates or anything like that.

Brecken: It kind of almost has that jelly, that jelly opal look.

Jonathan: Yeah. It kind of has that look. So that’s the fourth. So next would probably be talking about Mexico.

In Mexico, about 70% of all opal out of Mexico is just common opal. So they call it fire opal because it’s colored by iron. So most of it has an orange, a red, or a yellow tint to the base color. So rather than white or light in color, like most opal it has that fiery look that orange and yellow, and most of it has no play of color. And it was formed by volcanoes. It’s volcanic rather than sedimentary.

Brecken: Yeah. It comes out in these really cool, like nodules that are what, sandstone surrounds them. And you can kind of like chip away at the sandstone because it’s really light. I mean, it’s really soft.

Jonathan: It’s really soft and you can kind of scrape it away.

Brecken: And you get these really cool amorphous shapes that lend themselves well really creative jewelry.

Jonathan: And so we find that much more interesting. And it’s also one of the only opals that are faceted. So they do a lot of faceting of the orange and red material.

Brecken: You’ll hardly ever see an Australian faceted opal. No, it’s not gonna happen.

Jonathan: You just don’t see it. It’s mostly from your Mexican.

Brecken: Well, it wastes a lot of material too.

Jonathan: Yeah. Yeah. But that’s not a problem with Mexican, because most of it’s just common anyway.

Brecken: And then the next is Ethiopia.

Jonathan: Which has really been producing a lot in the last 10 years.

Brecken: Yeah. We saw it come to market 9-10 years ago really strong when we were in Tucson.

Jonathan: Yeah. So we were at the Tucson Gem Fair and that’s where 10, about 10 years ago it really came on strong. And so the Ethiopian material is very interesting. Most of it is hydrophane. So hydrophane means it’s porous kind of like a pumice stone and not such big holes, but uh, little tiny holes and so if you drop it in a glass of water, most of the color disappears. You take it outta the water sometimes it dries out. Sometimes it doesn’t.

Brecken: Right. And it’s not so much a problem for durability, like cracking and crazing.

Jonathan: No cracking and crazing it’s fairly stable.

Brecken: But the problem is like daily wear.

Jonathan: So if you think about all the things ladies and even men wear on a daily basis, you know, your perfume, cologne,

Brecken: body lotion, even body oil. Even red wine.

Jonathan: Yeah, if you’re dunking your opals in… ,

Brecken: but it can actually take the color of, for instance, red wine and it can dye the stone.

Jonathan: Yeah. So that’s one of the interesting things is a lot of them, a lot of the Ethiopian material has dyed all kinds of crazy blues and purples and greens and oranges.

Brecken: Frank, my father-in-law Frank, had an opal lecture at Conclave a couple of years ago, and my mission was to go around Tucson and find dyed Ethiopian opal, and the color, all different colors. I had hot pink, lime green, and purple. And it, I mean, it’s kind of interesting.

Jonathan: It still has a play of color.

Brecken: But it’s dyed hot pink. Yeah. So it’s different.

Jonathan: It looks fake.

Brecken: Well, it is. Yeah. Well, it’s dyed hot pink opal. Like it doesn’t happen in nature.

Jonathan: It’s kind of crazy. So that’s kind of the strange thing about Ethiopian opal is that hydrophane and not all of it is hydrophane, but it’s, you know, all the parcels and everything get mixed. So you never know what is and what isn’t, cuz there’s no way of telling just from looking at it that, you know, this absorbs this much water and that absorbs that much water. You just can’t tell. So we’ve chosen to stay away from Ethiopian opal and focused primarily on Australian and Mexican

And the other thing that I think we should talk about is how you value an opal. What makes an opal valuable?

Brecken: Red!

Jonathan: Red definitely does.

Brecken: The more red, the more valuable. Also the brightness too.

Jonathan: Yeah. And so that’s what I always say is the most important part after what kind of opal is it? Is it a black, a boulder, a light, a doublet?

What is it after that? The most important part, saying that the type is all the same is the brilliance. How bright is it? And I like to compare it to, you know, a 10 wat light bulb versus a hundred wat light bulb. The a hundred wat light bulb is obviously much more valuable than the 10.

Brecken: Does it glow?

Jonathan: Yeah. Does it have that just absolute glow? And then the next thing that would be important, but mostly in black opal is its body color, base color. Base color becomes very important. Is the base color, does it add value to the play of color or does it take away from the play of color?

Brecken: Yes, the black color. So when you have that really, really black base color, it can make the play of color just pop, just scream. Sometimes though, when you get kind of in that gray middle tone, I think it detracts from it. Some it kind of weakens.

Jonathan: Same with, I think, in the Mexican or Ethiopian material, that stuff it’s kind of yellowish. Is that it’s hard to see the play of color. And the play of color just doesn’t really, it’s not as striking. And then I think transparency is really important. Is it a see through or is it opaque? And the more opaque the opal is, the more that play of color really jumps out at you. Where if it’s see through you know, it’s kind of cool, cuz it looks different on everything that you wear it, which is why some people like it transparent. But from a market standpoint, the more opaque, the more valuable.

Brecken: Yeah. The thing I like about opal is beauty is really in the eye of the beholder. I mean, whatever you like.

Jonathan: If you love blues and greens, it’s even better because they’re much less expensive than reds and oranges. So that’s one of the things is it

Brecken: If you like gray base that are kind of transparent. Perfect! There’s an opal for you. Like there’s an opal for everybody and yeah.

Jonathan: And that’s the other thing, is that opal comes in every price point. You can get an opal for $10 and you can get an opal for a million dollars and everything in between.

Brecken: And no two opals are the same.

Jonathan: So every one is unique and unique to the person, unique to the design. And that’s the great thing is people, a lot of times will ask us about our designs, “is that a one of a kind?”

And I said, “well, the opal’s one of a kind, so yeah.” You can’t ever repeat an opal.

Brecken: No. And a lot of times we actually make opal pairs for earrings by cutting stones in half.

Jonathan: So we call those a split.

Brecken: You can’t, I mean, matching opal is, it’s an art and my mother-in-law is extremely good at it.

Jonathan: Yeah, she does all our bracelets. If you wanna talk about matching. Matching 10-12 opals in a row, all to go together, it gets tricky.

Brecken: It’s time consuming and tricky and you, it takes a special person.

Jonathan: So one of the other cool things that also comes into value is about pattern is that. More pinfire or more broad flash. Your pinfire, like your little tiny dots of color, whereas your broad flash is like one single flash of color across the whole gemstone. Or the very most valuable is called Harlequin. If you think of like flagstones all put together in a garden, all blocked together, kind of and that’s, that would be the most valuable pattern.

Brecken: Yeah. We actually had. Pattern that we bought a couple years ago. Do you? I called it pixie dust. Cause it had like all the green little sparkles through it.

Jonathan: That’s like a pinfire, but like a really, really fine and very bright pin fire that was some cool material.

Brecken: I know, it made me think of tinker bell.

Jonathan: And then we’ve gotten some really interesting new doublets that have our tiger stripe pattern.

Brecken: Tiger. Zebra. Depends who you are, who you ask. We haven’t named that one yet. I’d probably lose too.

Jonathan: Uh, so that’s something that’s kind of cool is that you can even get with pattern, you can even get a cat’s eye opal.

Brecken: Actually your dad has that really cool star opal.

Jonathan: But those are much more rare and you can’t find. Don’t tell people about things they can’t have.

Brecken: Yeah, actually this is a, it’s a cool stone. That was actually mined in Idaho. And it’s got a three ray red star.

Jonathan: Very cool. We’ll try to get a picture of it and put it on the blog. That one’s really cool. And we’ll also post some pictures of the zebra or tiger stripe and to kind of give you guys some different ideas of what different patterns look like. And if there’s a pattern that we mentioned that you really wanna see that we don’t put up, just shoot us an email.

Brecken: I think the only thing we really didn’t get a chance to cover today. Well, opal is such a broad category. Like there’s so much we didn’t talk about. So I, we’re gonna do this in kind of a series.

New Speaker: The opal series.

Brecken: The opal series. And so, yeah, so we’re gonna have an opal series and I think next week, we’ll talk about Australian opal.

Jonathan: So the number one source for opal, and there’s so many different types of opal as well that come out of Australia. So we’ll definitely talk about all the different types and what makes Australia.

Brecken: So I didn’t grow up in the business and growing up, I thought that opal was only that really milky, white. Well, let’s not say ugly because I don’t wanna use that word, but you know, boring stone. And so when I met Jonathan and he showed me all of the amazing colors and the range of opals that you find in Australia from blacks to lights to boulder, it’s pretty amazing. So we’re excited about next week.

And if you have any questions or comments about this week, or have any topics that you would like us to cover next week, just email us at

Jonathan: [email protected].

Brecken: And we would be happy to answer your questions. That’s gonna do it for today. Thanks for listening.

Jonathan: Thanks for listening. Bye.

Brecken: Bye Felicia.

Jonathan: I got my groove back. I was hurting at the beginning. I was like, “I don’t want to do this!”

Brecken: Okay.