GARNET

Garnets are a set of closely related minerals that form a group, resulting in gemstones in almost every color. Red garnets prove to be most common, but modern gem buyers can pick from a rich palette of garnet colors: greens, oranges, pinkish oranges, deeply saturated purplish reds, and even some blues.

Red garnet is one of the most common and widespread of gems, found in metamorphic rocks on every continent. But not all garnets are as abundant as the red ones. A green garnet, tsavorite, also occurs in metamorphic rocks, but it’s rarer because it needs unusual rock chemistries and special conditions to form.

Demantoid is a rare and famous green garnet, spessartine (also called spessarite) is an orange garnet, and rhodolite is a beautiful purple-red garnet. Garnets can even exhibit the color-change phenomenon similar to the rare gemstone alexandrite.

All garnets have essentially the same crystal structure, but they vary in chemical composition. There are more than twenty garnet categories, but only five are commercially important as gems. Those five are pyrope, almandine (also called almandite), spessartine, grossular (grossularite), and andradite. A sixth, uvarovite, is a green garnet that usually occurs as crystals too small to cut. It’s sometimes set as clusters in jewelry. Many garnets are chemical mixtures of two or more garnet species.

THE HISTORY

Thousands of years ago, red garnet necklaces were worn by Egypt’s pharaohs, and were entombed with their mummified corpses as prized possessions for the afterlife. In ancient Rome, signet rings with carved garnets were used to stamp the wax that secured important documents.

Centuries later, red garnets were among the most widely traded gems. In the Middle Ages (about 475 to 1450 AD), red garnet was commonly favored by clergy and nobility.

Red garnet’s availability increased with the discovery of the famous Bohemian garnet deposits in central Europe around 1500. This source became the nucleus of a regional jewelry industry that reached its peak in the late 1800s.
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Garnet is the birthstone for January and the gem for the second anniversary.

CARING FOR GARNETS

Garnets should be cleaned with a soft brush in warm soapy water or wiped with a soft cloth.  Occasional machine cleaning is safe for these stones. When stored, they should be wrapped to prevent scratching by harder stones such as diamond and sapphire.  Always avoid harsh chemicals when wearing garnets.