Love it! Garnets

Since its January we are loving Garnet! Especially this stunning Garnet necklace set in Precious Platinum with diamond accents totaling nearly half a carat in weight! This stone reminds me of a superb red wine when held up to the light. Deep red flashes radiate from the stone as it shifts and moves. It’s truly gorgeous and a steal at $4200! Stock # 16562 GS

So for all of you with January birthdays, here’s a few little known facts about your birthstone. The name garnet comes from the Latin word meaning “seedlike” since the rich red hue was reminiscent of pomegranate seeds. Thought to be the only source of light on Noah’s Ark, the garnet has a long and storied history. A favorite of the King of Saxony, he had a honker of over 465 carats, garnets have had many uses. Plato, for example, commissioned a portrait to be carved into a garnet. The blood-red stones were also believed to have mythical properties. Some claimed that wearing the stone would protect you from evil and disaster and some even thought it could cure the plague. Although I have to point out here that they thought sapphire could do the same thing, so it seems fair to extrapolate that any old colored rock would do. Although I have to profess my doubt in this magic cure as it would seem that all of the people who used it, promptly died. So, not a huge success rate in my book. Fortunately for the garnet, Victorian era consumers fell in love with the stone and it featured prominently in jewelry during that time. 

It is mainly in the last forty or fifty years that garnets have truly shown their potential. You see, garnets aren’t all red. Garnets are found in every color except blue, a feat only surpassed by tourmalines, some garnets can even change color! Different colors of garnets are known by different names including Almandite, Rholodite,Grossular,and Spessartite. My personal favorite of the bunch are the Tsavorites. In my personal opinion, a tsavorite garnet looks the way an emerald wishes it could with its stunning deep green color with just a touch of blue. Garnets are also durable and resistant to everyday wear and tear making them excellent candidates for jewelry like our pendant. They’re so sturdy in fact that a garnet necklace was discovered intact in a grave dating back to 3000 B.C. And some Asiatic tribes would fashion garnet into bullets believing them to be stronger and more lethal than lead. Now I think that’s a bit ridiculous. No garnet can be stronger than lead. However, all of that being said, I would still run away if you told me that you were going to shoot me with it. Heck, I would run away if you told me that you were going to shoot a jolly rancher at me if it was coming out of a gun. 

So what have we learned? Garnets are exceedingly useful. They can substitute for paper and paint if you need a portrait. They’re highly medicinal and I’m sure they could cure the common cold if you hoped hard enough. They’re good for defense, I’m sure that in these modern times they would be capable of taking down both vampires and warding off zombies during the apocalypse. And most of all, they’re stunning, so you can look gorgeous whilst fighting carving your portrait; curing the common cold, and fighting off zombies. So you really ought to purchase this necklace… it’s for your health.