Superfine Natural Turquoise from the fabled Sleeping Beauty Mine of Arizona. If we have the story right, native Americans historically sourced Turquoise from that particular mountain range but the area was initially opened up by westerners to mineral exploitation for its rich copper deposits, in the early 1900s. Mineralogically, copper and Turquoise are often found in the same locations, and indeed the presence of copper helps produce the colour of Turquoise. Since the early 1900s both Turquoise and copper have been produced from The Sleeping Beauty Mine; Sleeping Beauty Turquoise achieved fabled status, its premium quality considered as being among the very best of American Turquoise, equal to the finest from the ancient source of western Persia, being of a clean strong blue relatively free of matrix.
Over time the more accessible Turquoise has been extracted; its extraction became more costly and less competitive, and finally, in 2012, the Turquoise side of the mining operations was closed down. The Turquoise centre-bead in the above necklace was sourced from Sapphex, when it existed in the City, before the 2012 closure. The price of this Sleeping Beauty Superfine Natural Turquoise has risen considerably in the past more than a decade, but certain dealers in the south-west still have stock of this finest Turquoise, having stocked up before the closure.