Unless you’ve been living in exile from radio, newspapers, television, internet and generally anyone who has any of those things, you wouldn’t have heard that Prince William is getting married to Ms Kate Middleton today. Actually, they are probably in the middle of their wedding ceremony as I type this. I’m not a Royal Watcher but even I can’t ignore this event.
Today, Ms Kate Middleton, (better type this faster so I don’t have to change her title midway in this blog post), will receive a wedding band. No doubt there will be much discussion of the design of this as details emerge, and possibly as much as discussion was made over her engagement ring. One discussion was the chemical analysis of her ring, sapphires, diamonds, and white gold.
In my previous life as an analytical chemist, I worked with instruments that used sapphire injectors. They were pretty little things coming in blue or red. They were also hideously expensive. Thinking about it now, they were about the size of the head of a small nail and for what the laboratory paid for them, it would have been, (and probably still), cheaper to buy a sapphire from a jeweller. It puts a different perspective on which sapphire is the better quality, the gem or the one being used to inject samples in a laboratory instrument.
