What makes Baltic amber so fascinating?
Who knows, if Marilyn Monroe had known Baltic amber, perhaps her famous statement would have been, “Amber is a girl’s best friend”—
This paraphrase is only seemingly improbable. Anyone who knows amber’s history, both ancient and contemporary, knows well that it includes many stories of people fascinated with the sunny stone. From our forebears who were fascinated with its warmth and beautiful colour, through contemporary artist who say that there is no other stone to provide them with so many possibilities of creative expression, to customers all over the world for whom it’s been love at first sight and amber is the only stone they want in their jewellery.
The magic of amber
Even though we know so much about amber, even though it has been researched in many laboratories by experts from various fields and is a main theme of scientific conferences, even though it is a source of knowledge about life on Earth aeons ago, it still hides many mysteries waiting to be discovered. This is why it always attracts us, makes us dream and wonder, inspires us to new discoveries and awakes a desire to own it. Is it not this mysteriousness that has made people consider it special for millennia until the present day? For the Chinese amber is one of the seven lucky stones, for the Arabs it is a highly-prized talisman. It is the magic hidden in its remarkable beauty, in the uniqueness of each and every nugget (no two pieces of amber are the same!), in its limitless patterns and textures (known as varieties), the wonder of its inner worlds (all you need to do is to illuminate a translucent nugget), in its over 40-million-year-long history that thrills us to this day (everyone’s heard of the Amber Room). And of course in jewellery, designed so that the setting highlights the beauty of a stone in a subtle and tasteful way.
Amber as valuable as diamonds
Would Marilyn have fallen for the beauty of Baltic amber? Hmmm— Hardly anyone would doubt that she fell in love with diamonds not so much for their beauty as for their value. Fortunately, amber meets both these criteria. Stereotypically, we associate it with a souvenir from a holiday by the Baltic Sea. But the truth has been very different for a long time. Over a decade ago, because of a vast fascination with amber and its image of being the perfect investment, especially in China, its price rose so much that it indeed became comparable to diamonds. It was then that amber began to be set in gold and combined with diamonds and other precious stones. This way amber jewellery became not only more beautiful but also more prestigious. Its sudden appearance in the world of luxury items only added to its attractiveness and piqued the desire of women who want their jewellery to be special and unique.
Amber’s natural beauty
Baltic amber has a wealth of varieties with a great deal of assorted degrees of translucency and colour, from light-yellow, through various tints of yellow to white, bluish, greenish, beige and brown. This is what makes amber a valuable and sought-after material in the global jewellery production. Just as in the entire jewellery industry, in amber’s case it is also natural stones that are the most highly valued. The world has gone crazy over rare colours such as white and yellow but beautiful speckled, spotted, dappled or unique bluish varieties will quickly find their enthusiasts. Jewellery with such amber instantly finds customers, especially when the setting is designed in a way that perfectly highlights amber’s qualities. And this, as everyone knows, is the skill of masters.
