November’s Yellow Gems: How to Make Them Sparkle!

November’s Yellow Gems: How to Make Them Sparkle!

While CRD is not particularly known for selling birthstone jewelry, most of our curated gems do fall into a birthstone category. One great exception however is the month of November. The official birthstone color is yellow or orangy yellow and not many gemstones have that color. The online lists include mostly citrine and brown topaz, both of which are available in abundance, so we do not bother with them in our shop. Also, while imperial and orange topaz are not always treated, citrine is usually just heated amethyst.

Another reason we do not carry many November birthstones is that yellow is just not a popular color. Most yellow gems we purchase sit in our shop for months, unless they are unusually vibrant or a cooler tone of yellow, like lemon yellow with a wee bit of green.

So let’s give yellow a little bit of a boost and tell you both what options you have in yellow gems, and how to work with yellow in a color layout.

Yellow Gemstone Options

Yellow Sapphire: This would be a very popular option, but pure yellows are fairly rare in sapphire. Unheated gems usually have a hue of vanilla or another warm tone mixed in, or alternatively, you see multi colored sapphires from Montana with hints of teal and green. The bright yellows are usually heat treated, and with very saturated orangy tones you need to ask about beryllium heat because that is extremely common. I have seen unheated yellows in very bright colors from Kenya but they are rare.

Yellow Tourmaline: Tourmaline rarely comes in pure yellows but there is an older find of canary yellow from Zambia that produced great rich yellow colors. Sadly, that find appears to be exhausted as I have not seen any fresh material on the market. Most other tourmaline tend towards orange (like the now popular sunset tourmaline), or towards olive green.

Yellow Garnet: The only yellow garnet I know of is Mali garnet, and most of the Mali garnet finds are older. One of my vendors tells me he has not seen any new material for about five years now, and that coincides with my experience as well. Mali garnet is not treated.

Chrysoberyl: Mostly known for its cat’s eye variety, faceted yellow chrysoberyl is one of my favorites among colored gemstone yellows. Mostly from Sri Lanka and Madagascar, chrysoberyl often has a light lemony appearance, with lime tones being very rare and more highly prized. Chrysoberyl is not treated either.

Yellow Diamond: definitely the highlight of all the yellow gems because of its brilliance, it is important to know that yellow diamonds can be natural or irradiated (and short of a lab test, there’s no easy way to make the distinction). I obviously prefer the natural yellows. If you look at the color terms that GIA uses for yellow diamonds, you can see that the natural colors of yellow range from a greenish yellow to a faint light, to a (very rare) lime tone, bright warm canary yellows and then into warmer browns and oranges. I think that they make a beautiful fall mix when used all together in 18 kt yellow gold. Especially the light yellow and golden tones look quite well together.

Other Yellow Gems: here’s a short list of other yellow gems that can be found in limited quantity; and their treatments:

Sanidine (Untreated) – mostly vanilla color
Danburite
(Untreated) – colorless, vanilla, and warm strong yellow as well as cat’s eye
Zircon (Heated) – often a brownish yellow, some unheated orange, the bright yellows are usually heated

Yellow Gemstone Designs

If you do not like the warm fall color palette, then you need to mix yellows with cooler tones. Below are some options that I particularly like with yellow. On occasion you can mix just two colors, but I generally recommend three colors of which two are related (i.e. yellow plus pink/purple or yellow plus orange/pink.

Pink Sapphire or Spinel, Garnet or pink Tourmaline

Purple Sapphire (or purple and pink), or lavender Spinel

Blue Sapphire or Zircon (dark blue sapphire, or dark and light blue like sapphire and blue zircon)

Teal and green Sapphire (like Montana Sapphire), or teal blue

Orange and Pink (orange Diamond, orange Sapphire, Mandarin Garnet)

Orange, pink and purple (sapphire together with the above, or even Amethyst)

Red (Spinel, Ruby, Mexican Fire Opal)

Paraiba tourmaline – this gem goes with almost everything!

 Most of these color combinations are somewhat contrastive, but you can also go tone in tone with an ombre type design. Here are some options for Ombres

Yellow to orange to brown

Yellow to orange and red

Yellow to green to blue or just to green

Do you have other suggestions for yellow gems, or color combos you like with yellow? Let us know.