Star Mountain Star Rubies
These Rubies in June at Guernsey’s auction house in New York City, will be auctioned off. These rubies represent a collection of extraordinary, museum-quality star rubies – described by experts as potentially the best in the world.
Weighing a combined 342 carats, the Mountain Star Ruby Collection consists of four one-of-a-kind gems. Each displays a perfect six-pointed star and their value can only be speculated at.
The most impressive ruby in the collection is called the Appalachian Star. At 139.43, it weighs just over a carat more than the 138-carat Rosser Reeves Star Ruby on display at the Smithsonian. The Rosser Ruby was found in Sri Lanka, the source of most star rubies, alongside Burma. This makes the Mountain Star Ruby collection even more unusual because the gems were found in Appalachia, North Carolina.
The finder, a humble local man and self-confessed “rock hound”, made the discovery in 1990 on one of his regular searches for rare and unusual stones, after which the four stones were examined by gemological testing labs in the US and Europe. He passed away shortly after this find of a lifetime, but not before an exhibition of the Appalachian Star ruby at the Natural History Museum in London in 1992 attracted some 150,000 visitors. The stones have remained with his family ever since.
