8x6mm Lapis Lazuli oblong, in a pendant handcrafted in Sydney, the gemstone setting created in solid Silver, the bottom granule and the top two connecting rings added in solid 9ct Gold. The 8x6mm Lapis is set professionally in Sydney by one of the City’s top gemstone setters.
The only ingredient of this lovely handmade item of jewellery not of Sydney, is the superfine AGrade Lapis Lazuli itself. The origin of this 8x6mm Lapis gemstone is the mountain fastness of the isolated far north-east of Afghanistan, the ancient, and only source of this fabled gemstone since ancient times, when it made the arduous journey, by donkey and camel, a thousand years and more before Ancient Rome, from the rugged far reaches of Bactria to the lushly fertile Valley of the Nile, where the artisans of ancient Egypt fashioned it for precious inlay work and for jewellery. (A little over a century ago, another source of this gemstone began commercial production, in Chile.)
Lapis Lazuli is a rock, its intense deep blue the result of the mineral Lazurite. Lapis comes in all sorts of grades, for its host rock is often present in the cut gemstone, especially in the inclusions of pyrites and calcite. The very best grades of this gemstone are those that present as deep blue with minimum surface impurities, though many appreciators of Lapis love to see a touch of the silver-gold of pyrites. The above 8x6mm Lapis Lazuli is of that very best quality, deep ultramarine with a fleck of pyrites almost invisible to the naked eye.