Lavender Fields of Youth Necklace

Bee’s Lavender Delight

At the cooler end of the light spectrum, bees are supreme. Blues, violets, and purples are the colors of delight. Plus, if you can imagine, bees naturally see a color most of us can’t see, ultraviolet. Ultraviolet is a super purple. It’s a color that bees are psyched about seeing because in flowers, purple and ultra-purple let the bee know exactly where to land to collect the best pollen.

Many of the pieces we create at Cross are built to endure decades of wear, built to withstand almost anywhere you want to go and anything you choose to do. Some pieces like this necklace and earrings are more delicate…exquisitely beautiful. The gold links threaded through the gems are light, delicate, appropriate to the size of the gems. The finished look is light, airy, and best worn selectively.

The Lavender Purple Mystery Necklace

I’ve puzzled over the color purple most of my adult life. Purple is the last color most of us can see. It’s at the other end of the color spectrum. There is something beyond purple. Ultraviolet would be a possible name, but that actually is something we can “sort of” see with special lighting.

The Challenge Was
Fording Two Rain Swollen Streams in Trucks
Following a More Dangerous Route,
A Rutted Path up Over a Mountain.

My son and I went to an amethyst mine on the Maine – New Hampshire border in late October one year. We took the truck. They told us we’d be traveling back roads, farm fields, wood roads, fording streams with no bridges, and in the last stretch climbing the side of a mountain.

My truck has high clearance and 4-wheel drive. They said we’d travel in convoy with other trucks and a gem mining reality TV film crew. It felt like an adventure from the Out of Africa movie, minus the rhinos and hippos.

It had rained for a week. There was mud everywhere. We met the group at a restaurant up in the mountains. The men were all serious, they plotted a more dangerous but dryer pathway up the backside of the mountain and down to the mine. They finally concluded we would ford the streams and take our chances on being swept downstream to waiting hippos.

The day was clear, with full sun, and blue sky. Most of the trees of late fall had lost their leaves. The air was cool, low forties, with a slight breeze out of the north. We’d dressed warmly, and had a full tank of gas, and sandwiches for lunch.

I had seen a box of amethyst crystals from this mine the week before. It was an historic gem mining location. They had been working the location for several months. The team was psyched to have a TV crew and a jeweler with a history of serious marketing onboard. I was there for two primary reasons: I’m curious, and I’m interested as a scientist in the color beyond purple. The color most of the human population can’t see.

Amethyst crystals are interesting. Many, at their base, start off colorless and as the eye travels up the base, the purple color intensifies until you reach the top, the point, the peak and it becomes a dark, rich grape color. The tantalizing part, the mystery, there is a color we can’t see just beyond the color purple and it’s not Ultraviolet, but it’s there.

Naturalists explain it’s a color that bees can see, but we can’t and this beyond purple color is captured in some flowers, and may even be present in certain shades of purple flowers…it’s there, but we can’t see it. We look right at things with color beyond purple and see something, it’s just not what a bee might see as it buzzes toward a flower.

Why all this discussion of hippos and bees and gem mining? Flowers are delicate. Their colors are temporary. Gems are millions of years old. Their colors are fixed and I thought at an amethyst mine I could see purple gems in place and might be able to identify portions of crystals that possess the color humans can’t see. Once I arrived at the mine, I climbed down into the pit. I studied what they were finding. Nothing leaped out as conclusive on the purple mystery question.

So, we’ve taken three steps back and focused on three distinct gems that lead up to the mystery color:

Blue Sky Topaz……Pastel Blue

Tanzanite……………Blue-Violet

Amethyst……………Grape-Violet

These are the colors at the end of the color spectrum. They are cool calming colors, relaxing colors, colors to sit easily next to, colors that won’t shout, colors that the mind, heart, and soul are happy to be near.

Wear this and be cool with it. Wear this and be the coolest lady in the room. Twenty-seven gems and then one big pear shape amethyst in the center. At its 18-inch length, this places the large amethyst two inches from your heart.

This piece, with its cool three-gem line-up, is more beautiful and precious than you could ever imagine. Wear this piece and the room temperature will feel 10° more comfortable. Wear this piece and everyone will know you have your color story together.

The amethyst and topaz are “World” gems, and although we mine both of these gems in Maine, all three gems in this necklace come from wide-ranging locations all over the world.