If you happen to have been born a libra, you might know that opals are your birth stone. And if you were not so lucky, perhaps you have been looking for a lovely gem that will make a good conversation piece. If this is the case, then you need to look no further than the humble, lovely opal. While opals might not be what most people consider their stones of choice, they have some lovely qualities about them. And since they are also reasonably priced, you can have an awful lot of opal for far less than an ordinary diamond or a silly pearl. After all, who wants a gem that is just one color, or that is little more than the hardened saliva of a clam?
Opals can come from a lot of different places. But some of the best opal mines happen to be in Australia. While an opal is just silica (which is very similar to quartz), small imperfections can cause it to take on all sorts of different colors. And while these colors can vary wildly (all the way from being one color to being a veritable rainbow of them), one thing is universally true of opals- they are lovely little rocks that come from humble places. And because of this, an opal is pretty darn cheap to pick up.
While a five carat diamond that is in any kind of gem condition might fetch a few thousand dollars, a similarly sized opal may be less than a hundred dollars. Of course, every gem is going to be more expensive if it looks more beautiful than the average. But when it comes to finding a pretty little stone that says, “Yeah, I’m proud to be a libra,” you just will not find a better one than the opal. And if that were not a good enough reason to get yourself one, remember that they come in just about every possible color.