Pink-Red Garnet, Sydney Silver ring. The design of the ring is simple, taken from a Silver ring handmade in London in the 1950s. The original was set with a smaller gemstone, and rather than the two-bar flourish across the band, it had one thicker bar. The attraction of the design was its proportions, and while changes were made in the Sydney-crafted model, in the use of the larger gemstone and in the two-bar embellishments, the pleasing widening of the band of the 1950s ring, to meet the sides of the gemstone setting, and the high dome of it at that point, allowing for an attractive low-set look and feel of the gemstone setting, were faithfully retained in the above Sydney-crafted Silver ring.
The above Pink-Red Garnet is a lovely gemstone, very clean and transparent. This variety of the Garnet family is called Rhodolite, after an ancient Greek word meaning “rose-like”, or “rose pink”; gemmologically speaking, the pink tinge to due to the presence of magnesium in the crystal formation, how many eons ago.
Garnet of this quality has become scarce. India is the source of the above lively gemstone, purchased in Jaipur back in the 1980s, and India still produces commercial quantities of Garnet, but increasingly it has become difficult to source material that is not cloudy, not heavy with inclusions.