Not a Ruby_ How Garnets and Spinels Entered Royal Jewelry Vaults

For centuries, a magnificent red stone in a royal jewel was almost automatically called a ruby. But history has produced some spectacular surprises. Stones that sat in crowns and tiaras, passed through imperial treasuries and even carried the word ruby in their names eventually turned out to be something entirely different: spinel. Unlike garnet, which was generally recognized as a separate family of stones, red spinel was particularly easy to confuse with ruby before modern gemology could distinguish their different mineral structures. And closer to our own time, both spinels and garnets stopped being substitutes and became desirable jewels in their own right. So which “rubies” fooled kings for centuries, and which royal red jewel was presented to Queen Elizabeth II but almost disappeared from public view?