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To find our offerings for the order of your choice, please select our Singles, Pairs, Sets, or Parcels categories. We are constantly expanding and improving our inventory. In case you fail to find your desired item, please kindly revisit our site soon, or simply place a Special Order.

Pairs: While it's fairly easy to find similar pairs of diamonds, with Gems it may take weeks, or even months, to get two matching stones. Yet you need much more than mere luck to spot a gemstone's twin sister: expert eyes and the knowledge of where to look. We at algadgems.com have them both and remain committed to finding the best pairs of stones available.

Parcels: For wholesalers and retailers, we offer parcels (or lots)
of high-quality gems, every single one of which has been hand-selected by our experts. From small parcels to larger orders, algadgems.com can provide the world's choicest rubies, sapphires, emeralds and myriad other gems.

Treasured for 6,000 years, emeralds were already much sought-after items in the gem markets of Babylon. The ancient Egyptians were mining emeralds long before other gems as far back as 2000 BC in the desert of Upper Egypt near the Red Sea. They buried the mummies of their notables with an emerald attached around the necks. It was carved with the hieroglyphic symbol for verdant foliage as the gem symbolized eternal youth and rebirth by virtue of its luxuriant spring-like greens. Cleopatra valued her lustrous emeralds so greatly that the ancient mines in Egypt are now called Cleopatra's Mines. In India, moguls inscribed sacred texts on emeralds and wore them as talismans. The ancient Romans dedicated the emerald to Venus, the Goddess of Love and Beauty, and Emperor Nero reportedly wore emerald sunglasses to watch the gladiators fight in the Coliseum.

Symbolically, it's the gem of eternal spring; prosaically, the emerald is simply a variety of the mineral beryl. Primarily green, emeralds often display tints of yellow and blue. Too much blue, however, and a beryl is classified as an aquamarine. Not green enough, and it's known as a green beryl. That's why the greener an emerald, the more valuable (and eye-pleasing) it is. With color and clarity being their defining features, the most desired emeralds come in shades of lustrous green and with as few inclusions as possible (although rare are emeralds that are completely "clean," or inclusion-free).

High-quality emeralds come from the mines of Zambia, Brazil, Pakistan, Zimbabwe and Russia. Interestingly, emeralds' color and inclusions betray their country of origin. Most of the world's finest emeralds are still mined in the jungles of Colombia. Already in the sixteenth century, the Spanish Conquistadors, grasping for gold, were stupefied to find, in the lands now constituting Colombia, massive loads of beautiful emeralds unrivalled by any they had ever seen. The natives had mined emeralds there a millennium before the arrival of the Europeans, and the Inca and the Aztec peoples liberally used emeralds in their symbols and decorations.

To this day, people who believe in the transcendental powers of crystals attribute to emeralds the virtue of increasing cleverness and preserving love. And all can agree with the first-century Roman historian Pliny the Elder that "nothing greens greener than emeralds."