Jennifer Lopez’s neon blue-green stone
Eight hundred carats of diamonds were the supporting act. The thing everyone looked at was one neon blue-green stone.
Wearing: At Vogue World: Milano, reported by the jewelry trade press — A 74.459-carat Paraiba tourmaline pendant set in white gold with diamonds
The piece was Dolce & Gabbana's Alta Gioielleria Oceanina necklace: a 74.459-carat Mozambique Paraiba tourmaline, in 18-karat white gold, with more than eight hundred carats of diamonds around it. We have this from the jewelry trade press rather than the celebrity desks, which is usually where the accurate stone details live.
Why the colored stone wins against that many diamonds. It is simple contrast. Eight hundred carats of white diamonds, however extraordinary, read as a bright texture — a field of sparkle with no single focus. One saturated stone in the middle of that field is the only thing with a hue, so the eye has somewhere to land. Diamonds surrounding color make the color look more intense; color surrounded by color just looks busy.
What Paraiba actually is, since it gets used loosely: a copper-bearing tourmaline with a neon blue-green glow that looks almost lit from inside. It is genuinely rarer than diamond and priced accordingly, which is why nobody reading this is buying one — and also why the color is the transferable part, not the stone.
If you want this effect for real money. Look for that specific blue-green-teal range rather than a true blue. Apatite, blue-green topaz and good synthetic spinel all sit in it, and against both silver and gold tones the color does the same job: one point of saturated hue on a neutral outfit. The mistake is going too pale — a washed-out aqua reads as nothing at a distance, where a saturated teal reads from across a room.
What transfers
One saturated color will out-perform a great deal of sparkle, because sparkle is a texture and color is a focus. If you own one statement necklace, a colored stone earns its place more often than a clear one — and buy the saturated version of the shade rather than the pastel, because pale colors disappear at conversational distance.
