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It is a gemstone that has so many advantages over many other gemstones.
It is less expensive than diamonds.
It is harder and therefore more resistant to scratching than Emerald and Opal.
And two more, less well known, advantages are:
Firstly, they can be found in a variety of colors and types:
Blue sapphires, pink sapphires, yellow sapphires, purple sapphires, orange sapphires, green sapphires and black sapphires - most black sapphires are also star sapphires (a flashing star that seems to come from inside the stone and moves when the stone is moved).
Secondly, anyone who wants to can literally pick them up off the ground, and I'm talking about quite valuable gemstones.
Treasure hunting is exciting and can be rewarding. But some are out because of the large budgets needed - for example sunken wrecks and diamond pipes. Treasure hunting in some other areas is available for those with small budgets - gold prospecting and opal mining, for example, but unlike prospecting for sapphires, the chances of even covering expenses is highly unlikely.
Sapphires are different. Camp beside a sapphire creek for the week-end with a few helpers and the chances are very good that you will come home with a jar full of sapphires and it is highly likely that a few of them will be quite valuable.
The reason for this is that they are easy to see and that they cluster in pockets.
If they were like most stones they would be scattered evenly around the creek bed and finding them would be like looking for a needle in a haystack.
They are made from Corundum, which is a very hard material (second only to diamonds on the hardness scale). In addition, however, they are very heavy. This is why we can find them so easily!
It works like this. The creek, as it flows, pushes small stones downstream. When these stones reach an obstacle, such as a large rock, the light ones bounce over the top and continue downstream. The heavy ones, the sapphires, hit the rock lower down and sink to the base of the rock. Even the smaller ones, which might make it over the large obstacle, can sink to the bottom, close to this large obstacle, but on the downstream side.
So go to large rocks in a sapphire creek. Dig with a small shovel, upstream first and then downstream of this rock. Throw the stuff into a sieve - do a bit of sieving and there they are - a pocketful of sapphires.
A little earlier in this article I said that they are easy to see. Sapphires form in crystals. They sheer in planes and so, at the sheer, they glint like little mirrors. How convenient.
Good hunting!
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