Opalicious!

This is my ultimate favorite pieces. When I was younger, I never really liked opal. I thought it was only for the Lola's but now, I see the beauty of the stone. Not because I am nearing that stage in life but because now, I understand how nature has made opal into something unique and almost alien-like stone. It reminds me of a galaxy that emits millions of colors.

Here's a little information about the stone.

Precious opal shows a variable interplay of internal colors and even though it is a mineraloid, it does have an internal structure. At micro scales precious opal is composed of silica spheres some 150 to 300 nm in diameter in a hexagonal or cubic close-packed lattice. These ordered silica spheres produce the internal colors by causing the interference and diffraction of light passing through the microstructure of the opal.[4] It is the regularity of the sizes and the packing of these spheres that determines the quality of precious opal. Where the distance between the regularly packed planes of spheres is approximately half the wavelength of a component of visible light, the light of that wavelength may be subject to diffraction from the grating created by the stacked planes. The spacing between the planes and the orientation of planes with respect to the incident light determines the colors observed. The process can be described by Bragg's Law of diffraction.