Ceylon Blue Sapphire

Between 1810 and 1820, the name "royal" blue appeared. The name "royal blue" comes from British royalty. This shade of royal blue was created by a British tailor for a competition in order to create a dress to be worn by Queen Charlotte at the beginning of the 19th century.

Royal blue's color has changed over the years. Before the 1950s, royal blue was a much deeper shade than the official version approved in 1980 by the World Wide Web Consortium. The latter then associated the lighter royal blue with its RGB code.

The original royal blue appears on the flag of the United Kingdom and is the colour closest to that used today for royal blue sapphire.

Royal Blue is the term used to describe sapphires with the deepest and most vibrant saturation. It was probably first used by British gem trader to describe sapphire when Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and Burma (now Myanmar) was part of the British Empire.

The colour blue, which is also the colour of the ocean and the sky, is known to evoke feelings of tranquility. The colour blue represents importance, significance and confidence. Blue corporate suits and blue uniforms are all derived from here.

The color of a sapphire is the most important factor in determining its value. Royal blue is a sapphire with a blue-violetish hue. The saturation can be intense or deep in some rare cases. has more information on colour grading. See here.

Clarity plays a big role in the value of a Sapphire. Royal blue sapphires should be perfect, preferable clean to the eyes, or transparent at least, with no pronounced inclusions which are visible under the surface. The colour uniformity must be excellent or evenly distributed.


Cut is a key factor in determining the color of a sapphire. Royal blue sapphires should have excellent to good proportions to maximise total internal reflection. The face-up view of royal blue sapphires must not reveal significant windowing, extinction or transparent areas.

Classifying the colour of gemstones is a combination of science and art. The adjective "Royal" encompasses many different facts about sapphires. It isn't as easy as you might think to classify a transparent anisotropic crystal like a blue Sapphire. The color, saturation and tone must fall into a range of values to be called "royal".

The blue sapphire colour is the result from a major color chromophore - iron with titanium paired. It replaces aluminium in the structure. The more iron and titanium pairs, the deeper the colour of sapphire. Iron and titanium are found in blue sapphires at a concentration of between one and two pairs of tens atoms per million. In blue sapphire, iron and chromium play an important role. Iron content tends towards making the sapphire more greenish, decreasing its saturation of blue and increasing the tone. Chromium on the other hand makes it more violetish.

Quantifying chromophores is an excellent way to compare colours without having other factors influence the results, such as the reflections or the path of the light through the sapphire. By combining the method with the overall dimensions of the stone we can analyse and compare the most influential color factors to our reference collection "Royal-blue" sapphires.

Blue Sapphire stone must be heated or not treated. Any other treatment, such as diffusion into the sapphire's lattice of foreign ions, such as beryllium, titanium, fracture sealing using resin, lead, cobalt, and/or silicate, will not qualify for Royal blue, or any other colour grade.