The enigmatic opal
By Chloe Tomasik - 24/10/2007
Opal is October’s birthstone - arguably the most enigmatic stone of the twelve. The name opal comes from the Sanskrit ‘upala’ or the Greek ‘opallos’ meaning colour change. They are cut semi spherical and when you look at them you can see flashes of bright red, green and blue on a dark or cream background. The more spectacular the colour change, the more valuable the stone.
And after looking at vividly coloured opals, the Arabs' belief that opals fell from the sky in flashes of lightening seems quite understandable.
Intriguingly, opal is the gem most associated with bad luck - but this has not always been the case. In Roman times opals were thought to bring good fortune. In fact this belief was so strong that Mark Antony banished a senator who refused to let him have a particularly fine opal he owned. The opal, was supposedly intended as a gift for Cleopatra. Perhaps her fate might have been different had she received the gift!
The opal’s unlucky epithet was said to be due to one of Sir Walter Scott’s novels, ‘Anne of Geierstein’ (1829) where the opal, worn by the heroine, had her ‘life force’ caught in the gem. The opal reflected her moods and, when she died, the light in the opal was extinguished.
A rather more gruesome reminder of the opal’s bad luck can be found during the Crimean war (1854). At that time it was fashionable for English soldiers to wear opal rings. The Czar saw an easy way to find out the number of dead English by having the fingers with opals on chopped off and given to him in a basket. He simply counted their number - once again furthering the opal’s association with misfortune.
There are, however, some more cheerful superstitions about opals. Apparently blonde women in Eastern Europe would wear opal necklaces in the belief that they would protect their hair from losing its colour. And in some parts of Europe it was thought to make the wearer invisible so it was often called the thieves’ stone.
Like many of the gems in the past opal was used for medicinal purposes. In the middle ages, it was called opthalmos, the ‘eye stone’ as it was believed to be beneficial to eyesight. Opal is in fact a gel which forms or replaces fossils and can occur in any fissure of any rock. It is composed of up to 20% water and the rest is amorphous silicon dioxide. Because there is so much water in the stone, if an opal dries out under extreme circumstances it will disintegrate - which could be one of the reasons that it was thought to be unlucky. Wearing it as jewellery is the best option, as the humidity in the atmosphere is sufficient to keep the stones in good condition.
Historically, the opals used from Roman times right up to the Middle Ages came from the mines in Hungary. When these were exhausted there was a scarcity of stones until Victorian times when the opal mines in Australia were discovered in the 1850s. Queen Victoria was said to be thrilled at their discovery and commissioned several pieces of opal jewellery. Clearly she never gave credence to any of the bad luck stories.
Opals were very popular with a wide range of jewellery designers. The more traditional ones setting them with diamonds, whilst the avant garde Art Nouveau designers preferred to use opals still embedded in the matrix of rock - a more natural style.
Opals are very soft stones, ranging from 5.5-6 on the scale of hardness. They should never be cleaned in any machine but just wiped gently with cool water. This way you should be able to keep your stones looking as Shakespeare called them - "the Queen of Gems".