Finest Garnet Cabochons, perfectly matched in colour, cut and size, bezel set in earrings of very nicely handcrafted Silver.
Garnet is a complex crystal family with at least eight different members, all with the same sort of crystal structure, all quite similar physically, but, depending on what else was going on around in the cooling period of their formation, with differences in the chemistry that has created different colours, from the wine-red of the above Almandine type, through pinks and browns and bright brandy hues, to different greens.
The above Almandine triangular cut is the Finest Garnet of its type, the pair in a deep, perfectly matched wine-red, made subtly mysterious through their cabochon form. The source of these Garnets is India. India has been the world’s major source of this gemstone for the past century, but it has become difficult since the early 2000s to find the sort of quality of the matched pair above, the modern offerings tending towards the murky, a lesser translucency, and rather than the fine wine-red of the above gemstones, there is now often a tendency to an underlying brown-ness. The above matched Garnets are part of a store of gemstones built up in the 1980s.