Most gemstones come in one color, one shade only. Some gems come in a couple of different shades, but are basically the same color when you really get down to the specifics of it. While this is the case for basic gemstones, the classics such as those used as birthstones, there are other kinds of stones that come in a wide variety of colors, such as tourmaline or amber. While tourmaline is popular in certain areas of the country and there are only a limited number of people who have heard of tourmaline before, amber jewelry is virtually taking America by storm. It's been starting for a little while already, but it seems that amber is the new gem for just about every taste in jewelry.

This jewelry comes in very small, refined pieces, which seems to suit people with a more delicate taste in jewelry. This sort of amber jewelry is usually made with silver and has a silver chain with an amber stone of one color, or perhaps more, as a pendant in the front of the necklace. The same goes for earrings and for bracelets; one or a few small pieces of amber are set as the centerpiece in a piece of silver jewelry. One of the popular looks with amber jewelry is to either match pendant, earrings, bracelet and ring to be all made of the same silver and the same color of amber. Conversely, you can choose a pendant with three colors of amber, usually orange, yellow and green but are not limited to those, and then have the earrings of one color, the bracelet of another, and the ring of another color of amber. This is done because presumably the necklace will be the biggest piece, so it should contain the most colors and then each of the three coordinating pieces complements with one color of amber.

Amber jewelry also comes in very large, tribal looking fashions. These pieces of jewelry frequently do not have silver or another metal as part of their construction, but rather are constructed entirely of amber, usually with the connecting fibers being in the interior of the pieces of amber. The result of this type of jewelry is a sort of ethnic look, a grassroots approach to jewelry, but one that is elegantly beautiful instead of being beautiful in a simple way, like hemp jewelry is.

When amber jewelry is made this way, with large pieces of amber, the biggest advantage is that you can see the variation within a stone of one color of amber. An orange, a yellow or a green stone has many hues inside of it, but the smaller stones set in silver don't really allow this property of amber to be seen. These large pieces of jewelry are certainly not to suit everyone's style or every occasion, but the rainbow effect they produce, thanks to this internal variation in the stone, is stunning.