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Garnet

Garnet has been linked with the color red for thousands of years. This association dates back to the early Greeks who named the gemstone after the red color of pomegranate seeds. Today, red remains the most common garnet color, but they were also discovered to yield a rich array of colors including green, orange, pink, purple, yellow, brown, blue and even change color from blue to purple.

Garnet is a very complex family of 24 different mineral species, only five of which are commercially important as gemstones. Its high refractive index creates great brilliance, making it a lovely choice for use in jewelry. Red garnets are widely available, but that’s not the case for all garnets. At 100 East Fine Jewelry we find garnet’s numerous species, varieties, colors and sizes excellent options for our jewelry. Some varieties you may encounter here thanks to their vivid colors include:

  • Rhodolite and some pyrope garnets - among the reds, these are our favorites. We find the lovely purplish red of rhodolite garnet and the pure reds of some pyrope garnets, as long as they aren’t too dark in tone and don't show brown modifiers, make stunning jewelry pieces. 
  • Tsavorite, demantoid and mint garnet - we find these are outstanding choices among the green garnets for luxury jewelry.
  • Spessartite garnet - the oranges of spessartite can be spectacular when included in the right piece.
  • Hessonite - its browns, orange and cinnamon colors we find quite intriguing.
Garnet is also the January birthstone. To learn more, check out this great page authored by gemsociety.org, explaining what a rhodolite garnet is! You can also learn about gemstones and their treatments, including surface coating and irradiation, and fine jewelry care and cleaning as well as many other topics on our Education and Resources page.  

 

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