Thousands of years ago, red garnet necklaces adorned the necks of Egyptian pharaohs. Garnet stones were buried with their mummified bodies as valuable possessions for the afterlife. In ancient Rome, seal rings with engraved garnets were used to seal wax that secured important documents.
The term carbuncle was often used in ancient times to refer to red garnet. Although this term was used for almost any red stone. Carbuncle was thought to be one of the four precious stones that God gave to King Solomon.
Centuries later, during the time of the Roman scholar Pliny (23-79 AD), red garnets were among the best-selling gems. In the Middle Ages (c. 475 to 1450 AD), red garnet was favored by the clergy and nobility.
The availability of red garnet increased with the discovery of the famous Bohemian garnet deposits in Central Europe around 1500. This resource became the nucleus of a regional jewelry industry that peaked in the late 1800s.
Types of garnet Gemstones
Garnets are a collection of closely related minerals that form a group, resulting in gemstones in almost any color. Red garnets have a long history, but modern jewelry buyers can choose from a rich palette of garnet colors: greens, oranges, pinkish-oranges, deep purple-reds, and even some blues.
Red garnet is one of the most common and widespread gemstones found in metamorphic rocks (which are rocks that have changed due to heat and pressure) on every continent. But not all garnets are as abundant as red garnets. Green garnet, tsavorite, is also found in metamorphic rocks, but is rarer because it requires unusual rock chemistry and special conditions to form.
Demantoid is a rare and famous green garnet, spessartine (also called spessarite) is an orange garnet, and rhodolite is a beautiful purple-red garnet. Garnets can even exhibit a color change phenomenon similar to the rare gemstone alexandrite.
All garnets have essentially the same crystal structure, but differ in chemical composition. There are more than twenty categories of garnet, called varieties, but only five are commercially important as gems. These five are pyrope, almandine (also almandite), spessartine, grossular (grossularite), and andradite. Sixth, yuvarovite, is a green garnet that usually occurs as crystals too small to cut. Sometimes it is placed in a cluster in jewelry. Many garnets are chemical mixtures of two or more garnet species.
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