Dazzling selection of the world’s biggest, finest and most unusual gems unite in a single exhibition

CNN
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Aaron Celestian isn’t a giant fan of “Ocean’s 8.”

“I’ve a tough time watching these films as a result of they’re at all times robbing museums,” he mentioned with fun, standing amid a vault stuffed with a few of the world’s rarest gems. “It’s actually private.”

It’s simple to grasp why: Because the curator of mineral sciences for the Pure Historical past Museum of Los Angeles, Celestian oversees the Gem & Mineral Corridor. Proper now, the corridor has some particularly valuable cargo in its present exhibition, “100 Carats: Icons of the Gem World.” (And by way of the exhibit as an entire, “100 Carats” is sort of the understatement: There are greater than 3,000 carats on show by means of April 21.)

“These gems are simply the true treasures of the world,” mentioned jeweler Robert Procop, who organized the exhibition in collaboration with the museum.

There are at present 17 huge gems on show inside the corridor’s Hixon Gem Vault — which is dutifully locked each night time — and 9 extra items of knickknack adorn the partitions outdoors. The centerpiece is the Jonker I diamond, a 125-carat stone that has, over time, been handed by means of the arms of jewelers, royals and luminaries internationally.

The gem from which Jonker I used to be reduce was found by diamond prospectors in South Africa in 1934.

“The story goes: It was raining at some point… after which as a result of all of the rain simply washed away the sediment, they discovered a 726-carat tough diamond,” Celestian mentioned.

It was bought by Sir Ernest Oppenheimer, who offered it to jeweler Harry Winston in 1935 for £150,000 (and shipped it from South Africa to New York Metropolis for 64 cents). Winston then had it reduce into 13 items by Lazare Kaplan — one of many world’s most well-known diamond retailers — with a instrument coated in olive oil and diamond mud. The Jonker I used to be the most important reduce.

“He offered it to King Farouk of Egypt in 1948,” Celestian mentioned of the Jonker I. “The King had it for about 4 years… (earlier than he) was deposed and exiled from Egypt.” At this level, Celestian continued, “the diamond went lacking.”

Although the gem has been photographed alongside celebrities comparable to Shirley Temple, the general public hasn’t had the prospect to see it in individual for a lot of many years — since 1937, the truth is, Celestian instructed CNN, “when it was on show on the American Museum of Pure Historical past in New York for 3 days after it was reduce.”

Even when your data of luxurious jewels ends with films like “Uncut Gems” and “Gents Want Blondes,” the exhibit is a once-in-a-lifetime alternative to see a few of the world’s largest, best and most uncommon pure stones. The gems that Procop and Celestian rounded up embrace a color-changing teal sapphire just lately found in Tanzania, a 241-carat piece thought to be one of the good “emerald reduce” gems and an array of deeply saturated tourmalines.

Apart from the Jonker I, all the gems within the vault are new discoveries unearthed and bought in the previous couple of years. Many are on mortgage from their (non-public) homeowners, whereas different items — and the jewellery outdoors the vault — have been reduce by Procop.

Procop — a jeweler for royalty and the uber-rich, recognized for collaborating on charitable initiatives with A-Listers simply as Angelina Jolie, and whose work can also be included in the Smithsonian’s collection — makes it sound like sourcing such gems is a bit of cake. With a trusted community of miners, brokers and consumers from around the globe, he doesn’t need to hop on a airplane to get his arms on a 100-carat piece. Reasonably, he can have them delivered proper to his door, through armored vans, in fact.

However to grasp the true significance of the gems within the exhibition’s vault alone, it’s useful to know that carats (all 2,387 of them in there) are a unit of weight, not measurement. Rubies and sapphires, for instance, are denser than diamonds, which implies that a 1 carat ruby or sapphire will probably be smaller than a 1 carat diamond.

To convey that measurement to guests, Celestian arrange a show of gems that vary from one carat to 100 carats, alongside a useful reference level for these of us who won’t ever maintain an enormous gem: 100 carats weighs about the identical as 4 nickels.

The exhibition’s academic show additionally has one of many world’s most valuable gems hidden in plain sight.

“I at all times prefer to put little Easter eggs within the reveals I do… on this case, it’s this one carat (gem) that’s the world’s rarest gemstone,” Celestian mentioned, pointing to a mineral known as Kyawthuite. The reddish-orange mineral was found by a gemologist in Myanmar in 2010; “It’s the one one in existence that we’ve ever discovered,” Celestian added.

Although nothing else is sort of as uncommon, the opposite gems on this exhibition are distinctive, vividly coloured, and largely unseen. “The Ukrainian Flag” is the most important bi-color topaz that’s been unearthed, “The Imperial” is probably the most beautiful inexperienced tourmaline ever discovered, the exhibit claims, and “The Crown of Colombia,” is the most important and most pristine emerald ever present in, as its identify suggests, Colombia.

“To have one thing this clear, this clear, and this large, and this saturated in colour, is unreal,” Celestian instructed CNN of this latter piece.

The gems inside the vault are all unmounted — to protect them of their “purest type,” Procop defined — and displayed inside glass circumstances that permit viewers to understand their particular person colour, measurement and reduce. The teal sapphire even has a show gentle that adjustments each few seconds to deliver out the gem’s full colour spectrum.

“Once I had this within the lab, it was like, woah,” he mentioned. “It was actually unimaginable how the colour was simply altering.”

It’s unlikely that the gems will ever be underneath the identical roof once more. People who belong to the museum will return of their vaults, however the remaining will return to their rightful homeowners. Just a few might also be put up on the market. Within the meantime, the museum’s director, Lori Bettison-Varga, hopes that guests depart impressed by the gathering.

“As a geologist, that’s what I completely love about sharing these gems: the geologic story, and what we are able to study from these specimens,” she mentioned. “After which the inventive, spectacular method that human ingenuity has introduced them to life.”

It definitely by no means will get previous for Celestian, who nonetheless finds awe within the lovely stones that our planet has created.

“I’m an environmentalist — I really feel robust and obsessed with that — and I see these as a method of reflecting again on how we extract stuff from the earth,” he mentioned. “To supply these magnificent stones, and to see them, is a mirrored image again on our personal place on this earth.”