Star of Bombay, 182 carats, bequeathed by Mary Pickford to the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History

Rubies and sapphires are actually the same mineral, corundum. Both have long enjoyed favor in high places, appearing in royal jewels since ancient times.

Hindus offered sapphires to the god Krishna so they could be reborn as emperors.

Europeans associated sapphires’ heavenly blue with eternity and believed it would prevent poverty, make a stupid man wise and an irritable one good-natured.

The star sapphire, said to be a spark from the Star of Bethlehem, was particularly coveted, its three crossed rays representing faith, hope and destiny. This one, weighing 182 carats, has to be one of  finest in the world and must be seen to be believed – which you can do at the Smithsonian’s Natural History Museum.

Here’s another example of that most-coveted shade of sapphire, deep royal blue, this one surrounded by 89 carats worth of diamonds – and up for grabs next month if you happen to have half a mill to spare.

Designed by Mouwad, it’s expected to fetch $400-600,000 at Christi’e Dubai in October. A matching pendant/brooch (part of a parure but sold separately) is expected to go fo $180-250,000.

That deep blue is what we associate with the finest, precious sapphire but the gem actually comes in every color of the rainbow – as you can see from this sampling from that world-class collection at the Smithsonian.

Ring of fancy colored sapphires in 18kt gold by Klaus Spies (spiesjewelrydesign.com)

Kashmir and Burma once produced the finest blue sapphires, but the majority these days come from Australia and, most recently, Madagascar.

Slightly paler but still valuable are those from Sri Lanka, the earliest source—along with India—of this historic gem. Small sapphires are being mined in Montana as well.

Etruscans were the first to use sapphires, in the seventh century B.C., and by the Roman era, they were known as the “king” of all gemstones. Easy to see why.

You’ll also get a chance to meet and greet Cornelia Goldsmith who will be showing luscious new pieces like this necklace:

…and these earrings:

Other jewelry artists who will be showing: Davide Bigazzi, Lukasz Bogucki, and Ann Marie Cianciolo. If that’s not reason enough to head over – and how could it not be? – there will be live entertainment by The Bangles, Modern English, Dave Mason, and Jefferson Starship. (Now there’s a lineup I haven’t seen in a while!) More info on the festival site.

Gerarad Marti (in Loree Rodkin & Royal Order necklaces, bracelets by Ari Soffer, Borgioni & John Hardy) and Steven Tyler of Aerosmith (in Borgioni bracelets, Shannon Koszyk rosary & turquoise from Peru)

Men may think twice about wearing jewelry to the office but you’d be surprised how many keep a stash of skull rings and Celtic cross pendants in their dressers. That’s because when they’re safe at home or partying with likeminded friends on the weekend, they’re rock stars.

Just ask Gerard Marti, who left a career as a record producer at EMI (1974-1989) and opened a Maui gallery with his wife Colleen, using his rock-world connections to sell the artwork and signed memorabilia of famous rock legends and, eventually, the jewelry they made famous. (The jewelry was Colleen’s idea.)

I visited Marti’s galleries in Lahaina and Wailea in June and, while my husband was drooling over the signed Fender guitars, and artwork and lyrics by John Lennon, I was ogling the jewelry by Ari Soffer, Royal Order, Borgioni, Pianegonda, Rosalina, and Loree Rodkin.

Tommy Lee (wearing Ari Stoffer and King Baby jewelry) with Criss Angel at the 2007 Scream Awards.

Paris Hilton has been known to close this gallery down – literally – so she can buy out the jewelry. But she wasn’t in town – and neither was Steve Tyler, Mick Fleetwood, or any of the other celebs who hang out with Gerard in their off hours. So I got to bend his ear:

If you compare the shot of Keith Richards in my first post to modern rockers, it doesn’t look like rocker style has changed much in four decades.

It hasn’t. This look has been around for ages. Keith Richards has been wearing that skull ring forever. It’s his trademark. Steve Tyler, Tommy Lee, every single musician in rock-and-roll wears a skull in one form or another – in a ring or pendant or t-shirt.

The skull is a rock staple, it comes from the image of the pirate, the black flag, and that’s been around for centuries. It’s an image of being a rebel, an outlaw, someone who lives life by different rules.

More is definitely better with the rocker look, isn’t it? The more outrageous, the more layers, the better it works. Steven Tyler is really good at that. So is Tommy Lee.

Well, Steven will wear anything. He was on vacation [in the top shot] wearing a hat and beaded necklaces he got in Chile and Bolivia mixed with jewelry he got from me. He was just returning from being on tour in South America. Steven mixes everything. He can wear silver, beads, chokers, feathers. He comes to my store and tries on girl clothes, kids clothes. If I give him a t-shirt, the first thing he does is take a pair of scissors to it to make it his own.

Steven Tyler wearing Borgioni bracelet and custom-made necklace

The cross is another staple of rock jewelry. In this shot, Steven Tyler is wearing Christ without the crucifix.

He had that custom-made, that’s his thing. But crosses have been around forever too – not just Catholic crosses but Celtic crosses, all kinds. Skulls and crosses are the major sellers in the gallery.

Just last night, I sold a skull ring and cross necklace to one of the founders of MySpace, a 38-year-old millionaire. He was telling me, ‘I spend every day in a suit and necktie and on the weekend, I like to dress down in jeans and t-shirts and look like a rock star.’

He actually said that?

Yeah, yeah. I have a lot of people – dentists, lawyers – everybody wants to be a rock star, even millionaire businessmen. You want to be a rock star because that’s what everybody wants: to have fun, drink, party, sleep with a bunch of girls. That’s the fantasy even if it’s not your reality. Trust me, my customers are businessmen with wives and kids, all very successful financially, but they still secretly want to be rock stars.

Stay tuned for more on how to wear jewelry like a rock star. If you’re lucky enough to visit Maui any time soon, you can play out your own rock star fantasies at Célèbrités Galleries.

Topaz earrings designed by JAR in diamond surround with ruby clusters (Christie's Images)

One of the JAR jewels made famous at the 2006 sale of Ellen Barkin’s jewelry is up for grabs again – four years later and in the same showroom, Christie’s announced yesterday. Those who didn’t make the winning bid can try again in October, if they still have the funds.

These earrings created a stir when Barkin put them up for sale, along with more than 100 jewels from her ex-husband, Ron Perelman, including 17 by Joel Arthur Rosenthal (JAR). But no one predicted these would sell for $710,000.

In fact, many people thought the $60,000-80,000 estimate was excessive. “People talk about the topaz earrings in the Barkin sale and question the price,” said Ralph Esmerian, then owner of Fred Leighton, before the 2006 sale. “But the interesting thing about Joel is that he doesn’t evaluate stones from a normal dealer perspective. Other people focus on certificates, lab reports. Joel makes sure it’s natural but he will tell you the perfect cut, the type of color. He’s thinking conceptually from start to finish. He’s looking for a certain palette, the look of 19^th century jewelry or Russian jewels.”

(Esmerian would make headlines himself in 2008 by declaring Fred Leighton bankrupt and having the Christie’s sale of his famous jewelry collection cancelled at the last minute, only to see most of it sold there a year later.)

Hundreds (including me) showed up for that Barkin sale, where lovely women in long, black gowns modeled the actress’s jewels while a well-heeled crowd bid furiously (a scene parodied in the first Sex & the City movie). A signature JAR thread ring with an oval-cut 22.76ct diamond sold for $1,808,000 and a delicate pair of diamond bangles, estimated at $350,000–$500,000, went for $1,136,000.

Christie's sale of Ellen Barkin's jewelry in October 2006 (photo Cathleen McCarthy)

No one expected the topaz earrings to sell for ten times their estimated value, however, not even François Curiel, who organized the sale.

“These will bring a lot of money, probably $150,000,” Curiel said when he showed me the toffee-colored danglers the day before the 2006 sale. “JAR had the topaz beautifully cut in this long, elegant marquis shape inspired by a window of a palace he loved. What are they worth really—$10,000, $15,000 at most?”

Four years later, Christie’s has upped their own estimate to $300,000-500,000 for the October 2010 sale but a spokesperson for the auction house admits it’s conservative. Times have changed since the heady days of late 2006, when art and jewelry were setting world auction records, but JAR jewelry still brings hefty prices at auction. We’ll see this fall if JAR still carries the cachet to make a topaz jewel worth three-quarters of a million, recession or no recession.

Emerald and diamond "Thread" ring by JAR sold for $242,500 in 2009 (Christie's Images)

Patricia Hambrecht, a jewelry consultant who worked for Harry Winston and Christie’s for many years, recalls a party she once attended in Argentina where a lovely woman was standing across the terrace. As she moved her head, something caught the light beneath her long hair. Hambrecht strolled over and asked to see her earrings. The woman smiled and said, ‘They are.” Hambrecht replied: “I know.”

The earrings were designed by Joel Arthur Rosenthal, a Bronx-born designer known among jewelry insiders as JAR. “JAR’s jewelry has become, if not a code, a little society all over the world,” Hambrecht explains. She loves how the backs of JAR jewels are always as beautiful as the fronts. “It’s like wearing the best silk lingerie. It’s made for the pleasure of the wearer.”

When the newly-divorced actress Ellen Barkin announced she was selling her jewels from ex-husband Ron Perelman at Christie’s in 2006 – an auction that inspired a scene in the first Sex & the City movie – the media buzz surrounding the sale did not focus on the vintage treasures by Cartier and Van Cleef & Arpels or those once owned by the Duchess of Windsor. It was about 17 pieces by JAR.

Christie's auction of Ellen Barkin jewels in October 2006 (photo Cathleen McCarthy)

Many articles about the designer appeared after the sale was announced but the designer himself did not. Not a word of his was quoted. This surprised no one in the industry, where JAR has long been known for his elusiveness.

Ellen Barkin's JAR Thread ring set with a 10.12ct old mine-cut diamond sold for $464,000 (Christie's Images)

When JAR opened his little shop on the Place Vendôme in Paris more than three decades ago, he had no jewelry training. He graduated from Harvard in 1965 with a degree in art history and philosophy and moved to Paris the following year. He has never done any bench work and isn’t much of a draftsman. Former director of jewelry for Christie’s and now head of Christie’s Asia, François Curiel organized the Barkin auction and has known JAR for decades. “He draws like a child,” Curiel admits.

Yet from the beginning, JAR attracted high-profile customers with his unusual sculpted, pavé creations, often using the blackened silver-gold alloy he developed. He never produces more than about 70 pieces a year and half are commissions inspired more by his own whims than that of his A-list clients.

Judging from observations by his acquaintances, the man has a waiting list a mile long – and an even longer list of people pining to get on the waiting list. Which may be why his jewelry usually sells for well above estimates when it appears at auction; that’s the only time JAR jewelry is immediately available to anyone who can pay the price.

How did this untrained American designer become bigger news than Cartier and Van Cleef & Arpels? It has something to do with how difficult his jewelry is to get, of course, but also its craftsmanship—JAR is known to send pieces back to the workshop many times—and its quality of being individualistic yet recognizable at the same time.

Tourmaline and diamond ear clips by JAR sold for $241,000 in 2007 (Christie's Images)

About half the jewelry JAR produces are special orders. The other half are his own one-of-a-kind designs. “When one wants a piece of jewelry from someone other than one of the major houses, something no one else has or that was designed especially for you, where do you go?” Curiel said before auctioning off the Barkin jewels. “Whenever I ask this question the answer is JAR, JAR and JAR.”

“His clients know they have to wait,” says Saul Goldberg, a diamond dealer whose family, William Goldberg & Co., has been selling stones to JAR for two decades. Goldberg and his father have been trying to predict JAR’s taste in stones for years. “Give him a pear-shape diamond and he’ll say, ‘Cut off the point at the bottom, then show it to me.’ He looks for something exotic. He likes flat stones, not conventional cuts, soft cuts like a cushion or an oval.”

He has even been known to set conventionally-cut diamonds upside down, as he did with Barkin’s wedding ring: four rows of diamonds set with culets pointing up. I tried this ring on before the 2006 sale and it looked lethal, like bejeweled brass knuckles. I couldn’t help wondering if JAR had a sense of foreshadowing when he designed it.

Despite his exclusive clientele, JAR is not a snob, Curiel insists: “He is very amenable…not a high flier.” Goldberg agrees: “He follows his own vision. His clients can’t rush him. He’s not dictated by their whims but by his own. He’s a good model because he shows that if someone wants something bad enough, they’ll wait.”

This post was adapted from a story I wrote for JCK magazine.

Faceted peridot from San Carlos (photo Tino Hammid)

Charles Vargas is one of the few Apaches born and raised on San Carlos Reservation who left to get a college education and work in the outside world. That experience helped him recognize the treasure he and his tribe had been sitting on for more than a century: peridot.

When I visited the reservation in 1997 with Elana Verbin, then-editor of Colored Stone magazine, Vargas showed us around and told us stories about the peridot he grew up with. His mother remembered playing games as a child with the little green stones scattered around the reservation. No one paid them much attention, although local trading posts would buy them for a few cents on the dollar.

After returning to San Carlos, Vargas began mining peridot and, in 1993, launched Apache Gems. San Carlos has since become one of the world’s primary sources of gem-quality peridot.

When the U.S. government designated a large chunk of central Arizona as an Apache reservation in 1871, they had no idea how mineral-rich it was. Silver and copper were discovered there a few years later and the government began re-appropriating large sections – including the area in nearby Globe where the coveted Sleeping Beauty turquoise is mined.

Some of that land was returned to the reservation in 1972. San Carlos Reservation now covers 1.82 million acres, about half its original size.

A miner with San Carlos peridot (photo Cathleen McCarthy)

Mining on San Carlos is still done primarily by freelancers with pick and hammer. When I took these photos to accompany Elana’s story, the mining operation had just transferred to a new location on Peridot Mesa. A couple local miners were working the side of the canyon with a pick. A few yards away, a mother and her 5-year-old son were picking at the chips with a gardening fork, filling a mason jar and sawed-off Coke can with greenish pebbles that would be tumbled for beads. After a couple hours, she brought the jar to Vargas. He handed her $30 and she left with a smile to buy some groceries.

Charles Vargas buys peridot from a local family in 1997 (photo Cathleen McCarthy)

Vargas told us he encouraged this and tried to get people to come to him directly so outsiders wouldn’t try to scam them, as traders had been doing for generations. Folks on the reservation weren’t looking to get rich, he explained, just to get by. “Gold and gems are not seen as valuable goods but as a loaf of bread or a box of diapers,” he told us.

At the time, tribal elders were worried about losing control of the mine and Vargas was working hard to keep profits on the reservation. A decade ago, when the last census was taken, San Carlos was one of the poorest reservations in the U.S., with almost 59 percent of its residents living below the poverty line. Vargas worried the tribe’s dependence on government subsidies would lead the U.S. to claim some of its mining operation.

Peridot mine on San Carlos Reservation (photo Cathleen McCarthy)

Thirteen years later, Vargas is still running Apache Gems and only members of the San Carlos tribe are allowed to mine Peridot Mesa. You can find Apache Gems jewelry at galleries and museums, including the Heard Museum in Phoenix, Autry National Center in Los Angeles, and the reservation’s own cultural center.

Charles Vargas at his mine on San Carlos Reservation, 1997 (photo Cathleen McCarthy)

Thanks to Vargas, many folks on the San Carlos Reservation are now trained lapidaries with a solid understanding of geology. Yet individual wealth is still not highly valued. “You could tell someone that there’s sapphire over there in that ground and the stones go for $10,000 a carat and they’d say ‘that’s neat,’” he told us.

Sapphire had been found on the property not long before and Vargas was hopeful that more was on the way.  But while many other gems have appeared, including opal and, more recently, fire agate, peridot remains the tribe’s bread and butter.

Peridot Mesa produces mainly small stones with good yellow-green color – the kind that sell for about $97 to $175 per carat these days, according to the latest edition of Antoinette Matlins’ Colored Gemstone. Gem-quality peridot weighing five or more carats is rare and can cost $165 to $275 per carat. I also hear the San Carlos mines are more carefully guarded these days.

So far, so good.

Peridot set in gold with diamond accents by Atelier Zobel (Ladyfingers.com)

First recorded peridot was found as early as 1300 B.C. on Saint John’s, an Egyptian Island in the Red Sea.

It’s said that this green gem was impossible to spot by day but glowed in the dark, so was mined only after nightfall.

Set in gold, peridot was said to achieve its full sun-driven power against the evils of the night.

Next best option, according to Marbodus, Bishop of Rennes: Pierce the peridot, string it on the hair of an ass and tie it to your left arm. Not quite as attractive but cheaper and solid protection against the evil eye.

Peridot pendant of sterling and 18kt gold by Klaus Spies ($790, spiesjewelrydesign.com)

Finest examples of peridot in the world – in deeper greens rarely seen today – originated in ancient Egypt and ended up in the treasures of European cathedrals, after looting during the Crusades. Many were officially labeled “emeralds.”

Most peridot today comes from the San Carlos Indian Reservation in Arizona, but in fairly small stones. Fine-quality peridot in stones five carats or larger is increasingly rare, which has driven up the prices for larger stones.

Peridot, a form of olivine, is just under 7 on the Mohs scale which makes it prone to scratching if not set properly. It’s also one of the few gemstones that aren’t routinely treated; that lime-green color is all natural.

He was studying sculpture at Tyler School of Art in the early sixties when he took a jewelry course with Stanley Lechtzin, head of the school’s jewelry department. Lecthzin, who was pioneering the use of electroforming in art jewelry at the time, became Paley’s mentor and the two of them helped make the Philadelphia area an apex of the Craft Movement over the next decade.

Paley juggled small sculpture and jewelry for a few years but sculpture appeared to be winning by the mid-seventies, judging by the body armor he was making then. This formidable pendant, for example, measures 19 inches long, extending the entire length of a woman’s torso. Many of his neckpieces were similarly phallic.

“I was approaching jewelry as an art form, not a fashion accessory. The scale related to the human form,” Paley told me a couple years ago. “My jewelry was not a flat, graphic statement like a lot of jewelry is. It was three-dimensional, like the human body. The concept was bodily ornamentation.”

While his pendants were often erotic, his brooches tend to reflect his fascination with Art Nouveau and classical civilization. Paley was fascinated by ancient Etruscan, Roman and Greek jewelry and made a series of fibulas.

Even when his fibulas followed classical form (unlike the one below), they could measure six inches wide – wearable but designed for the artist’s idea of the perfect woman: strong, independent, “with a certain personality that could carry it.” Like much of his jewelry, these oversize brooches hint at the largescale work to come.

"Double Fibula" brooch by Albert Paley of gold, silver, bronze, pearls, moonstone and labradorite, 1968

He had established his career as a studio jeweler and was teaching goldsmithing. “The whole art process is one, basically, of investigation,” he says. “At the time I was involved with the exploration of materials like gold, silver, copper, bronze. I was using iron, at first, as a toolmaker. I would make stakes, hammers and chisels to form the jewelry. Then I started looking at iron in an art context.”

In 1974, still working as a jewelry artist, he submitted drawings for the Portal Gates of the Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery and, to his surprise, won the commission. It changed his life.

“In hindsight, I never thought it would change my career in the way that it did but because of the reputation of the Renwick, I received other commissions that brought me into the context of architecture,” says Paley, who was 28 at the time. He soon discovered that large-scale architectural work did not mix well with jewelry-making. “Sitting at a goldsmith’s bench and swinging a hammer are totally different things.”

Portal Gates, 1974, of forged and fabricated steel, brass, bronze and copper. Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian Institute's National Museum of American Art

He was also frustrated with the art jewelry movement. “The field had become overcrowded and derivative,” he says.

Paley renounced jewelry soon after, retrieving pieces from various galleries and locking them away. Three decades later, the jewelry he made in the sixties and seventies sells at auction for prices that would have made him a happy man in his jewelry-making days. A brooch sold at Ragos Arts and Auction Center in 2006 for $30,000.

I visited Paley’s bustling, cavernous studio in the mid-nineties, on assignment for Art & Antiques magazine. Earlier this year, Paley moved his Rochester studio into an even bigger space to accommodate the construction of 100-foot sculptures – like the one at National Harbor, near Washington D.C. – and the dozen or more men who help construct them.

He wouldn’t trade these ambitious projects but sometimes misses the intimacy and independence of the goldmsith’s life. When Helen Drutt’s avant garde jewelry collection was exhibited at the Houston Museum of Fine Art, including four pieces by Paley, she told me Paley would never make jewelry again. But he has always defied expectations – even his own.

A couple years ago, he got a commission for a pendant and quietly dusted off his jewelry tools to make it. “When I was doing the jewelry nobody thought I would ever not do it, and once I started doing ironwork nobody thought I would ever make jewelry again,” he says. “I guess this’ll keep ‘em guessing.”

Pearl Orbit pendant (lattisdesign.com)

Seattle jeweler Gina Pankowski often uses pearls in her jewelry to symbolize seeds or eggs embedded in silver pods or protective shells. Sometimes these pearls are tiny and delicate, sometimes head-turningly large. To her, pearls represent contained life.

Her Pearl Orbit series began in 2000 when she was first thinking about starting a family. (She now has an 8-year-old.) “A pearl is an intrusion in the mollusk,” she explains, “and from that intrusion, that irritation, they create something so beautiful.”

Pankowski prefers natural pearls to dyed. “There are so many soft, lustrous, feminine colors available in natural pearls,” she says. This sometimes means paying a premium, especially for her favorite: the chartreuse-green South Seas pearls known as ‘pistachio,’ which she likes to combine with 18kt green gold.

Pearl Orbit pedant 3 (lattisdesign.com)

“I’m really into green. I’m an avid gardener and I love looking into the small layers of growing things,” says Pankowski, who studied botany and astronomy in college and worked for a while in a greenhouse. “A lot of my work reflects that.”

Sensual Tension ring (lattisdesign.com)

In her Pearl Orbit series, she takes the examination of “small, growing things” a step further, so that you’re looking not at them, but inside them – as through a microscope. “The pieces, in their finished phase, can be like looking at botanical cells, the pearl being the nucleus of the cell.”

Pearls make the most dramatic impact worn on the neck, in Pankowski’s opinion. She makes dramatic earrings, rings and bracelets – and not just with pearls – but she prefers to design pendants and necklaces.

“I do a lot of one-of-a-kind neckpieces. I find they make great performance pieces,” she says. “Given the scale of some of my pieces, you can’t avoid being transformed. You are the ultimate public art. When you’re walking around wearing a great piece of jewelry, people stop to look.”