Surreal Georgia: Gemstones in my treasure-chest

Today and from time to time in the future I’m going to open my treasure-chest especially for you. Years ago I studied Mineralogy and this science is still my secret love. I studied Mineralogy because my father showed me all the fossils you can find in the lime-stones around his home-village Wethen. My father still knew all the places and different kinds of fossils from his childhood. This was the time when my love to stones and especially gemstones began. During my childhood my father and I started collecting minerals and searched for them wherever we had a little opportunity to go outside. So we have had a collection of fossils from Wethen, a collection of agates from Dorsten north of the Ruhr-Valley, where we lived at that time, a collection of various minerals from the Eifel (a volcanic mountain region near Aachen) and a lot of other stones. My father also brought home a lot of rare minerals from August Thyssen, a huge steel-company, where these minerals were needed for steel-production. I still have these colorful Fluorites we also cut and polished ourselves and I still have some of the ores.

And I especially love gemstones, not only for wearing them as jewelry, but mostly because of their colors and the sparkling a well cut stone shows.

Today I want to present you one of my favorite gems, the Peridot or Chrysolite: The most attractive feature of this stone is it’s color, a very intensive oily olive-green. But there are also stones with a tender golden or brownish green. The ancient Greeks and Romans found this gemstone on an island in the Red Sea which they called Topazius and this is also how they called the stone. Today the topaz is a different gemstone which I’m going to present you in a following post. Maybe the today name Peridot is from the Arabian “Faridat”, which meant gemstone in common.

Peridot is the name for all stones in gemstone-quality of the mineral Olivine, which is a Magnesium-Iron-Silicate. This mineral is very common in basaltic rocks, rocks which consolidated from fluid magma. When the magma gets solid Olivine is one of the first minerals that crystallize. But most of the crystals are much too small to use them in jewelry, because the magma usually cools too quickly and therefore it isn’t enough time for growing bigger crystals. So bigger crystals are very, very rare and if you buy them in jewelry they are pretty expensive compared to the smaller ones up to 4 x 6 mm, which are common. The color – I love this typical green – is caused by the iron: The more iron the more brownish , the less iron, the more green and dark the color becomes. Because the iron is a part of the crystal structure and not an impurity that causes the colors, there are only green stones. I will present you other gemstones with widely varying colors, because the substances that are responsible for the color are changing additions and not part of the crystal structure. Peridot isn’t very hard, so you have to be careful wearing it.