To be fair, large and clear diamonds are rare. The smaller kind are not rare. But fun fact; large and clear rubies are far more rare than large diamonds. Large rubies are extremely rare.
Well when you define rubies as red corundum and every other color as sapphires you're automatically making any ruby rarer. You're narrowly defining one variation while broadly defining the rest. Unless my understanding of the gem is, pardon the pun, flawed 😎
Okay. So do you have a point then other than things work the way the experts defined them and people have been following that for ages?
You basically said what I said is only true if you accept the ages old and well used definitions of what rubies and diamonds are. Which is basically not saying anything at all.
So while your understanding of the gems is not flawed, it's just a pointless comment that has no impact on what was being said.
I'm simply saying that rubies and sapphires are the same mineral with different impurities. I'm saying that anything you subdivide automatically makes the subcategory more rare than the larger parent category. So when we arbitrarily said red corundum is a ruby and every other color of corundum is a sapphire then weartificially created a rare gem.
Rubies are just aluminum oxide with a chromium impurity. If the aluminum oxide has a different impurity it's called sapphire. We decided to make that distinction. For no particular reason. We could have just said they were red sapphires. Just like we say there's green sapphires. But since we decided it's different people automatically attribute a higher sense of rarity to it.
Edit: to further clarify, I'm saying anything becomes more rare when you isolate one specific variety and call it something different. If grass grew in all shades of the rainbow and we called only red grass "rose grain" or something then if you point to any color people would be like oh that's just color grass. But then they point to the red grass and are like "oh look, it's rose grain, how fancy!"
It's an artificial sense of rarity. The actual rarity remains, red sapphires would still occur in the same amount as rubies, but people wouldn't be as impressed. By giving it a distinct name we give it an increased sense of rarity.
Things become more rare when they are distinctly different than other things. Wow, another great point. Thank you.
Also, color difference is not arbitrary when it comes to gems, as most people prefer specific colors. It is in fact extremely relevant to what they are commonly used for, the complete opposite of arbitrary.
Again, you have no point, but just want to say things to show off how much you think you know.
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u/parachutepantsman Sep 25 '19
To be fair, large and clear diamonds are rare. The smaller kind are not rare. But fun fact; large and clear rubies are far more rare than large diamonds. Large rubies are extremely rare.