All About Garnets

Garnets are not just the warm red colors often found in early antique jewelery. There are many other rich colors available. Garnet in fact includes a number of different gemstones with a very similar chemical structure. The red is the most frequent but other colors such as yellow, green and even blue, for example, have been found.

Also there are the color changing garnets, which will show up as a blue or brown in daylight but change to red or another colour in artificial light. This is called asterism and is extremely rare and mostly of these types of garnets come from and area in Madagascar.

Garnets are at around 7 to 7.5 on the Mohs hardness scale and are just below rubies and diamonds on the scale so are quite hard and very suitable for jewelery. Another point in favour of garnets is their high refraction of light, the reason for the amazing brilliance of Garnets.

The shape of the rough crystal is also interesting. Garnet, after all, means something like "the grainy" and is derived from the Latin word "granum" meaning "grain". This refers to the typically rounded shape of Garnet and also resembles of the seeds of the pomegranate. In the middle ages, garnet was also called "karfunkel" in German, referring to the glowing red of the sparks of fire sometimnes found within the garnet. Today there are a lot of imaginative names used in the trade, such as Arizona Ruby, Arizona Spinel, Montana Ruby or New Mexico Ruby.

Garnets have been used widely for many thousands of years. It is reported even Noah used a lantern from garnet in order to safely steer his Ark through the darkness of the night. Garnets can be found in jewellery from ancient Egyptian, Greek and Roman times. Many travellers wore garnets for protection also, as they were considered talismans and protective stones against evil. Today we know that the luminosity of garnet is caused by its high refraction of light.

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