Pink Coral and Silver bracelet. Gemstone Coral, also sometimes called “Noble” Coral, comes in all shades of red, from the very palest pink (almost white, with only the merest hint of colour), through pinks such as in the above bracelet, to orange-reds of such infinite gradation of colour that often, in India, trying to source old handcut South Indian beads sufficient for the creation of a necklace, and confronted with a number of partial bead strands, the inability to properly match in colour these old orange-reds can be confounding, for usually the beads of these old strands were originally cut from a single branch of gemstone Coral, imported from the Mediterranean, the single source colour not quite to be matched in any other of a dozen other such branches; to, finally, the rarest and most costly of gemstone Coral colours, red.
Interestingly, the color of gemstone Coral most found in English Victorian strands, the period of greatest appreciation, and consumption, of this lovely gemstone, was a darkish solid salmon-pink.
The Pink Coral in the above necklace is Mediterranean, purchased in Sicily in the late 1960s.