Blue Opal Gold Jewellery Necklace

Blue Opal Gold Jewellery Necklace .

By Mans Women Jewellery.

Precious opal

Precious opal consists of spheres of silicon dioxide molecules arranged in regular, closely packed planes. (Idealized diagram)

Multicolor rough crystal opal from Coober Pedy, South Australia, expressing nearly every color of the visible spectrum

Precious opal replacing ichthyosaur backbone; display specimen, South Australian Museum

Precious opal shows a variable interplay of internal colors, and though it is a mineraloid, it has an internal structure. At microscopic scales, precious opal is composed of silica spheres some 150 to 300 nm in diameter in a hexagonal or cubic close-packed lattice. It was shown by J. V. Sanders in the mid-1960s that these ordered silica spheres produce the internal colors by causing the interference and diffraction of light passing through the microstructure of the opal.