Garnet

Red garnet is one of the most common and widespread of gems, found in metamorphic rocks (which are rocks altered by heat and pressure) 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 rare because it needs unusual rock chemistries and special conditions to form. (http://www.gia.edu/garnet-description)

Garnets are a variety of gems, which makes its size large and its weight large. Demantoid is rare but is a famous green garnet because the garnet can exhibit a color change phenomenon similar to the rare gemstone alexandrite.

Garnets are a set of closely related minerals that form a group, which is called gemstones into multiple colors or many colors. The red garnets have a long history and modern gem buyers can pick from a rich palette of garnet colors, for instance like greens, oranges, pinkish oranges, deeply saturated purplish reds, and plus some blues.

Over a thousand years ago the necks of Egypt’s pharaohs wore a red garnet necklace and the garnets were entombed with their mummies corpses as a prized possession for their afterlife journey. If you remove the garnet from the mummy it was considered curse or bad luck. The Egyptians took the red garnets as a sacrifice to their God. In Roman times signet rings with carved garnets were used to stamp the wax that secured important documents.
Centuries later, in Roman scholar Pliny’s time (23 to 79 AD), red garnets were among the most widely traded gems. In the Middle Ages (about 475 to 1450 AD), red garnet was 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. (http://www.gia.edu/garnet-history-lore)

 

Garnet is the birthstone for January and the gem for the 2th Wedding Anniversary.