Welcome to the first blog in a series of blogs, aptly named 'Stone Of The Month'. If you haven't guessed yet, this will be focusing on each respective birthstone of each month. This month being December, we shall be looking at the rather unique Turquoise.
Turquoise is a relatively inexpensive semi-precious stone and has found a lot of popularity with its use within jewellery. A beautiful, nostalgic pale blue stone, that features a very complex forest of veins which are very visible to the human eye. Whilst most stones all have their own inclusions and imperfections that make them all unique to one another, Turquoise stands somewhat alone in the fact that its inclusions are so clearly visible, that you don't need a trained eye or visual aid to see them in their glory.
Unlike a great many semi-precious stones, Turquoise is opaque and not transparent, meaning that light cannot pass through it. For this reason, it's a great stone to use in all different kinds of jewellery, as the metal and colour of the setting that the stone sits in, does not affect the colour of the stone. Turquoise will pair wonderfully with any other stone with a high opacity, especially cultured pearls, but I would absolutely stay away from pairing it with a translucent stone, such as a quartz. Whilst I personally think Turquoise looks great within a traditional yellow gold setting due to the contrast of blue and yellow, my experience with jewellery shows it is more often found within silver. The use of Turquoise within silver jewellery is derived from ethnic Himalayan and Native American ornaments.
Over time, Turquoise does tend to discolour to a slightly more greenish colour; similar to the oxidisation process of copper, in which the rust starts to take on the beautiful blue green colour of verdigris. Due to this, it is common to find Turquoise that has been artificially dyed to recreate the colour it would have originally had. As with all things in life, the value is often diminished at the point of restoration, and to find a Turquoise stone that can be dated back centuries still retaining it's original colour, would be on the much rarer, more expensive end of the Turquoise spectrum.
Here are a couple of examples of Turquoise set jewellery that we have in stock:
This cabochon sterling silver ring features a very large turquoise stone. As we discussed earlier, turquoise is a relatively inexpensive stone, and so you do often find very large pieces set within jewellery, often silver too as that's also an inexpensive metal. It doesn't possess a letter date hallmark so unfortunately we cannot trace it back to it's creation date, however it certainly is an older vintage style ring. It weighs 7.4g, of which most of that weight is due to the stone.
Click HERE to view the ring in our shop.
These classic style bar drop earrings feature two small balls of turquoise. They are very subtle, much more so than the ring, and so are perfect to show off a little flash of turquoise. These sterling silver earrings weigh 1.3g so are perfectly light for comfort on your ears.
Click HERE to view the earrings in our shop.
Thank you for reading!
Written by Jamie