With delectable colors, fantastic coppery schiller, and other intriguing optical phenomena Oregon Sunstone is truly sublime.

Colors range from pale gold, to rosy apricot, to deep red and even occasionally green or blue green tones. Often stones are washed with metallic schiller that dances in the light. This schiller effect is caused by copper platelet inclusions. Stones are sometimes bicolored or tricolored and may be pleiochroic meaning they change colors when viewed from different angles.

Don't confuse Oregon Sunstone with the more opaque Indian Sunstone, they are actually two different types of Feldspars (a subgroup of gemstones) with distinctly different mineral composition and properties. Oregon Sunstone is actually a type of Labradorite and shares with it a metallic flash or "schiller". In the case of Oregon Sunstone the schiller is caused by copper platelets and the look is a shimmering apricot sheen. Not all Oregon Sunstone will have schiller, but it is one of the properties that many identify with Oregon Sunstone.

Formed in volcanic basalt flows over 22 million years ago, this rare stone has only been found in 2 areas of southeastern Oregon. It is very expensive to mine, and most of the stones are colorless or pale yellow with no schiller. Serious collectors know that for every 100 colorless feldspar stones they will find one with schiller, then for every 10 of these they may find a transparent red, and then for every 10 reds they will find a green. Rarest of all are those with both red and green within the same stone.

Although it is yet to be a household word, Oregon Sunstone is becoming a favorite among jewelry designers, lapidary artists and collectors. One reason for its popularity is that among the colored stones there is such a variety of optical phenomena such that every stone is a work of art in itself. Some stones are bi-colored or tri colored, often with a core of color and and an outer rind of sparkling pale yellow. It has been theorized that this characteristic rings of color effect is due to the copper ions leaching out of the outer part of the stone into the groundwater during its formation. Indeed, it is the red and schiller stones that contain the most copper, with green having less copper and yellow and colorless stones having none.

Some Oregon Sunstones may display "color change" under different types of lighting. Some stones are pleochroic, meaning they will display different colors depending upon the angle or direction it is viewed. And then there is the schiller. Only in Oregon Sunstone is the coppery schiller transparent enough to still offer the clarity suitable for faceting. Schiller can be 2 sided-- where the schiller is visible on opposite sides of the stone-- or more rarely 4 sided where it flashes shimmering copper -rose light no matter what direction it is turned.

Though Native Americans in the SE Oregon region collected and traded the shimmering stones for hundreds of years, some like to say that Oregon Sunstone is poised to be "The New Tanzanite" --really only "officially" discovered and recognized in the last 30 years or so, with a meteoric rise in popularity and limited supply eminent in the future.   Though there are some parallels and similarities, the story is not the same.  Tiffany and Company originally owned the mining rights of the so called "Plush Diamonds" from Oregon, but did little to promote them commercially as they did with Tanzanite.  It was only after the old Tiffany claims were  bought off  in the late 1980's that these gems began earning the recognition they deserve.