In this posting I have to apologize for my erroneous thinking in my last post. I said that the material I worked with in the pendant was sold to me as hematite after magnesite, but that I had decided it was hematite after magnetite. Well, go ahead and slap me upside the head! Yesterday I had one of my gem dealers in who is also a gemologist and I showed the piece to her and we got into a little discussion about it. Initially she also didn't recognize the material but when I told her about my online findings and my current thinking she looked a little closer at the piece and saw a perfect little cube sticking out of the bottom of the piece. Well magnetite won't form cubic crystals, but, surprise, surprise, magnesite does! So in fact my original dealer was right. The good news is that no matter which material it is, it still doesn't change the price!
Speaking of rare material some of you who have been customers for awhile may know about rainbow moonstone. It's been a material I've been quite fond of since it first came on the market. Technically speaking the material is actually a form of spectrolite (moonstone, sunstone, spectrolite, and labradorite are all members of the feldspar family). A few years ago the major sources of rainbow moonstone in Sri Lanka dried up and there has been very little new material coming into the marketplace. But my dealer who was in yesterday had a friend who, when the material was first found, was so taken by it that she invested in a large quantity of the material. Her friend had decided to sell it off so I got first pick on the material being offered. If I had enough money I probably would have bought the bulk of the collection but it was a substantial sized collection so I had to stick with picking out a few choice pieces. This material is similar to the early material I saw in that it is slightly cloudy and has more inclusions in it, but the colors are stronger and more distinctive than in a lot of the later material I got.
I tried to take a picture with my iPhone but I couldn't get one that truly showed off the material to its best advantage so I went on line and did an image search to see if there was something I could use there as a picture. However, while there were a lot of pictures of material that had a blue sheen across the top, none of them showed the oranges, pinks and purples that are so apparent on the pieces I got in. The piece pictured above had a freshwater pearl and a rainbow moonstone but you can't truly see the colors that were in this moonstone either. So really you should come by and look at the material I got in if you want to see how beautiful it is. This is one of those gem materials that we are, quite simply, running out of. If you want to own some, now is the time.
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