Lightning Ridge Bowtie Rolling Flash
This opal has a combination of bowtie, ribbon and flagstone in a rainbow rolling flash display.
Patterns and Color in Precious Opal
Play of color (or fire) may come in many patterns. Pattern refers to the physical structure and form of the play of color. There are a dozen or so patterns, some of them common and some are very rare. The most common patterns are pinfire and flake fire which look as they are described, like tiny pinpoints or small flakes of color. Think of black pepper, which may be finely ground or coarsely ground, thus making different size flakes. Medium to large flakes are also fairly common. Flake fire generally has individual flakes clearly separate from each other, floating in the white or dark body of the opal, so it is easy to identify the body color or body tone as it is sometimes called. Sometimes the amount and intensity of the fire is so great as to mask the body color and all you will see is the play of color. The opal pictured below is a good example of such closely packed flake fire.
- Allan
Less common are the broadflash and the flagstone. An opal with larger flakes of color may form a pattern know as flagstone if the flakes touch each other, looking like flagstones in a garden path or patio. If the flakes are so large as to cover most of the opal face with one flake, that is called broadflash. Both flagstone and broadflash may be either rolling or static.
Lightning Ridge flagstone
Rolling flash means that the play of color moves across the flake of fire, either filling it up like a glass of water or moving across the flake but not filling up the entire flake, much like a cat’s eye or tiger eye stone.
Static means that the color is either there or not and appears to fill up the flake or not be there at all, producing a flash of fire color which flashes off and on. Sometimes the color may be only one per flag, or sometimes an individual flag or flake may display more than one color, which may be either close to each other in the spectrum, such as blue to green or green to orange or orange to red. This gives the flake a subtle (or extreme) change of shade or hue as the stone is moved and your angle of vision changes. Other opals may display the full rainbow of color through an individual flake, causing what’s called a rainbow rolling flash. This is the rarest of rolling flash patterns and is most prized generally. The opal pictured at the top of this post is an example of that pattern.
The shape of the flakes is also important. The rarest and most expensive flagstone is called harlequin. This is often claimed but very very seldom seen. I keep a daily search alert on eBay for harlequin stones and see a true harlequin once a year at most. True harlequin is a flagstone pattern of perfect squares exactly the same size, like a checkerboard. Old timers in Aus called it tartan, but that term has died out and is seldom heard anymore.
Other more common but still rare flag shapes are bowtie, Bandera and ribbon. Ribbon is a stripe pattern, bowtie has flared ends and Bandera is like a flapping flag, rectangular but wavy.
Opals are also classified as to the number of colors which show. Most opals show only one or two colors in their display. Some show three or more and are referred to as multicolor. The predominant color is used to describe the multicolor phenomenon, such as red multicolor or green multicolor. This is important because reds are the rarest and most prized color, so a red multicolor will be more prized than a green multicolor.
I will post other examples of patterns such as pinfire and broadflash in later posts.
Lightning Ridge black pear shape with blue green fire
A recent parcel
Lightning Ridge Green crystal oval
Lightning Ridge flagstone pattern. The other half lights up with a slight tilt. Blue green gem fire on black body
A bit of the rough I’m cutting these days
Bright little LR multicolor, this is a vintage stone from my antique collection, approx 75 years old
