Jewel Shop Lighting
If you have ever been in our stores you may notice we have fluorescent type strip lights (now LED) with black backgrounds. This seems odd, but let me explain. When you look at a bright sparkle in a diamond and hold it very still and rock it back and forward a tiny bit you can see that it changes to a blue or a orange red colour i.e. rainbow dispersion. The bright white flash is because your line of sight is directed to the bright tube. When you move the diamond so you see the edge of the light-black boundary, the prism dispersion effect kicks in and you see the colour at one or the other end of the rainbow, blue or red. (Techy aside – you almost never see green because it is in the middle of the spectrum and the mixing of the orange, yellow, green and blue creates the bright white flash).
The benefit of this lighting is you can judge a diamonds ability to provide great brilliance and coloured firey flashes in the same lighting. I was granted another US patent for a brilliantly simple idea! If I was more smart than clever I would be making and selling lighting to all the jewellery stores in the world. This would be a great way for jewellers to do their bit and combat global warming because the power consumption required is less than a quarter of what most stores use. Our Brighton store is almost entirely lit this way and our aircon electricity bill has more than halved.