News

Opal jewellery care comes down to one fact most people do not know when they buy their first piece: opal holds water inside it, and that makes it more fragile than almost any other popular gemstone. Treat it like a diamond and you will eventually crack it. At Vanhess Jewellery in Coquitlam, BC, opal repairs are some of the saddest jobs that cross the bench, because most of the damage we see was avoidable. Here is how to care for opals so yours stays whole. Why opal is so much softer than it looks Opal sits at roughly 5 to...

Alexandrite jewellery is built around one quiet bit of magic: a stone that shifts from green in daylight to a soft red or purple under a lamp. It is the rare colour-change variety of the mineral chrysoberyl, and it sits among the most sought-after coloured gems in the trade. At Vanhess Jewellery in Coquitlam, BC, alexandrite comes up most often with June babies and with collectors who want something that does not look like everyone else's ring. Here is how to understand it and how to buy it well. The colour change, and why it happens The headline feature is...

If you have ever wondered why two diamonds of the same carat look different sizes, the short answer is that carat measures weight, not width. A carat is one fifth of a gram. It tells you how heavy the stone is, and nothing about how big it looks once it sits on a finger. At Vanhess Jewellery in Coquitlam, BC, this is one of the most common surprises we walk customers through: two stones can both say "1.00 ct" on the report and still look noticeably different across the top. Carat is weight. Size is what you actually see. The...

Why are diamonds so expensive? Three things mostly: the cost of getting them out of the ground, a quality grading system called the 4Cs that prices each stone, and one of the most successful marketing campaigns in history that taught the world a diamond was the only acceptable engagement stone. At Vanhess Jewellery in Coquitlam, BC, customers ask us this almost weekly, and the honest answer mixes real scarcity with manufactured demand. Diamonds cost what they cost partly because they are hard to mine and partly because we were all told for eighty years that they should. The 4Cs set...

A coloured gemstone engagement ring, set with an emerald, ruby, or sapphire, is a strong choice for anyone who wants something other than a diamond, but the three stones are not equally suited to daily wear. At Vanhess Jewellery in Coquitlam, BC, the first thing we talk through with a customer eyeing a coloured stone is hardness, because an engagement ring takes more knocks than any other piece of jewellery a person owns. Sapphire and ruby shrug those knocks off. Emerald needs more care. We have written about sapphire on its own before, so here we will dig into ruby...

A hidden halo engagement ring is a solitaire with a ring of tiny diamonds set underneath the centre stone, around the base where the prongs meet the band. You only see it from the side. At Vanhess Jewellery in Coquitlam, BC, we build these as custom pieces, and they have become one of the most-requested upgrades from buyers who want a bit more sparkle and presence without turning a clean solitaire into something fussy. From the top, the ring still looks simple. From the side, there is a surprise. What a hidden halo actually is Picture a plain solitaire. Now...