I’ve been making jewelry for a number of years now. Pretty early on I was directed to a company called Fire Mountain Gems as a potential supplier. They sent a copy of their catalog with my first order, which introduced me to a *lot* of stones I’d never heard of… more than a few of which had trade names.
Now, understand, humanity has only relatively recently become fussy about how accurately they name their stones. For a big stretch of history, if it was reasonably hard and red OR dark red OR black with red highlights when you tilted it right, they’d probably call it a ruby. (Example: the Black Prince’s Ruby in the state crown of England, which is a completely different gemstone called a spinel, but they named it before the 1780s which is when we started being able to actually identify rubies as rubies. So… yeah.) Some kinds of gem have had lots and lots of different names all historically referring to the same stone. It makes for interesting reading of historic accounts of this or that piece of jewelry. I can excuse it, it was the past, really formal gemology is only a moderately recent thing.
But these days I go to the store and I see yellow gemmy-looking beads hanging on the rack, and I look at the sticker, and it says ‘yellow jade’, only the price is way less than that much actual jade would cost online. Or I go to look for smaller beads to match a few pieces of actual turquoise that I have on hand, and I realize that I have no idea whether African turquoise is actually turquoise or not. It gets… irritating. I want to actually know what the hell I’m paying for and whether it’s hard enough to risk putting it in a bracelet or ring, or whether it’s a softer stone that should be kept in earrings and necklaces, away from possible scratching or impact. If you’re buying jewelry, or if you’re looking for stones for jewelry work, or if you’re someone who believes in the metaphysical properties of stones and crystals, you’re going to want an accurate understanding of whatever it is you’ve got in front of you, right? Right.
So, yeah. Here’s a few of the trade names I’ve been stumbling over since I got started in jewelry making.
New jade – This is serpentine. It’s a pretty rock but it’s not jadeite or nephrite; it’s not actually jade. Serpentine’s way common, since it’s basically a form of one of the most common minerals in the earth’s crust.
Ching Hai jade – Dolomite plus a couple of other minerals. Pretty, but not jade. Let me put it like this: on the Mohs scale of mineral hardness, nephrite jade is 6 to 6.5 and jadeite is 6.5 to 7. Ching Hai jade is 3.5 to 4. This stuff is softer than the outer coating of human teeth (Mohs 5, same as a basic knife blade and most kinds of everyday glass). You want a stone you can put in a ring where it’ll get whacked or bounced off hard surfaces or otherwise stand a chance of impact, you’re gonna want real jade. Ching Hai jade will get scratched clear to kingdom come with a Mohs score like that.
Yellow jade – It’s quartz. Nephrite jade comes in a lot of colors including yellow, but if they’ve labeled it ‘yellow jade’ rather than saying ‘jade’ or ‘nephrite jade’ then it’s quartz. Same deal for ‘golden jade’.
Malaysia jade – Also quartz.
African jade – yep, still quartz.
Black jade – Both nephrite and jadeite come in black forms, but if a stone is being sold with the name ‘black jade’, it’s 90% likely to be serpentine. Actual jade gets labeled as jadeite or nephrite. I don’t do metaphysical stone foo, but man, if you’re buying a stone because you want to use its mojo, seems to me you’d want to get the actual stone associated with what you’re trying to do, not a stone that’s the same color and level of shiny.
Peace jade – Serpentine plus white quartz. I don’t even know where they came up with this name. It’s pretty but it’s jade the way a pommel horse is a horse.
Yellow turquoise – Serpentine again. Or rather, serpentine and quartz. At least this stuff comes from the same mines as turquoise.
African turquoise – Jasper. It’s turquoise colored, but it’s actually harder than real turquoise, for whatever that’s worth.
Italian onyx – They also call this one onyx marble. It’s a kind of calcite. Takes dye really well so they use it in different color forms.
African bloodstone / Indian bloodstone – Legit name for the actual stone, for once! These are both names for the same thing. They also call it heliotrope. So any of those names all refer to the same thing.
Tigerskin jasper – And we’re back to the malarkey; this is limestone. With pretty stripes, but seriously, it’s not even jasper and jasper gets used as a substitute for other stones so wtf.
Aqua terra jasper – Onyx marble. They also call it impression stone, but it’s marble, and it’s on the soft side as stones go. Marble’s around Mohs 3 on a good day. That’s another stone you can scratch with your teeth.
Green Earth jasper – NOPE. Serpentine. Sorry.
Peridot jasper – Serpentine. Seriously, do you have any idea how many stones with pretty pretty names are actually just pretty pretty names for different colors of serpentine?
Zebra jasper – onyx marble.
Chinese chrysoprase- Oh look it’s serpentine again
Lemon chrysoprase – This is magnesite. Not dyed, which is a little unusual. Magnesite takes dye really well and gets sold in a lot of colors as a substitute for other stones. Selling it as lemon chrysoprase means someone managed to get hold of a yellowish color of the stuff.
Mosaic turquoise – If it’s labeled mosaic anything, it’s almost always fragments of a stone bound together with resin, and probably not even the stone it claims to be. Mosaic turquoise is ittybitty chips of magnesite that’s been dyed to match turquoise color, then stabilized together as a single piece. It’s not even close to being turquoise.
Green opal – okay, quick lesson: there are different kinds of opal, and not all of them have the flashy color changing fire you get with precious stones like Welo opal or Australian opal. Mexican fire opal and Oregon fire opal are good examples of other forms. The actual stone we call opal is a specific kind of silica with a certain level of water content, not just the pretty flashiness. And opals of both the flashy kind and the non-flashy kind do come in green. But if they’re selling it as ‘green opal’, they are selling you chalcedony. Chemically similar, but not as pretty, and a distinctly harder stone.
Red malachite – This is marble. They find marble with banding that resembles malachite banding and they cut it and polish it to look like malachite, just in a different color. Malachite is green; this isn’t even a thing like jade coming in different colors. There isn’t actual red malachite.
Opaline – this isn’t even a stone. This is glass. Same deal with ‘sea opal’. Sorry. Sometimes they sell chalcedony as opaline but whatever it is you’ve found it’s not opal.
Fused quartz – Glass. This is glass. Fancypants glass, but it’s glass.
Goldstone, or blue goldstone: Also glass. With bits of copper in it to produce really nice sparkly effects, but it’s still a kind of glass.
Sand stone or blue sand stone: I only found out recently that some people sell goldstone as ‘sandstone’, so… this one’s glass too. Actual sandstone is a sorta brown sedimentary rock.
Black moss quartz – This is glass. Worth noting, there’s a vaguely similar product out there called rutilated quartz. That’s actual quartz with spindly intrusions of a different mineral, rutile. Difference is, the quartz has a Mohs hardness of 7 and will scratch the ‘black moss quartz’s’ soft bitch ass six ways from Sunday as a result.
Fordite – This is paint. Fordite is automotive enamel that’s dripped onto the same spot on factory floors for so many years that it’s built up to the point where it can be cut and polished and made into jewelry elements. Unlike a lot of trade names, this one isn’t a form of bullshit to pass one thing off as another. People who go looking for fordite are specifically looking for gemstone quality layered automobile paint. Sometimes they call it Detroit agate or motor agate, but that’s more of a joke than an attempt to sell the stuff to people looking for actual agate. I can live with this trade name.
Rainbow calsilica: Apparently there’s just a huge amount of argument about this and some people say ‘this is natural and we found it and it’s got pretty pretty stripes of all different colors just naturally and it’s a totally awesome metaphysical marvel of a totally natural gemstone’, but the Journal of the Gemological Institute of America says ’dude, you powdered carbonated rock and added paint and stabilized it with resin, wtf’. So yeah, be warned. I mean, it’s pretty and all, and you’ll probably pay way less for it than for chrysocolla (a natural stone with somewhat similar striping), but… be aware it’s probably something a guy in a factory or a lab put together, okay?
And citrine: Okay, this isn’t exactly a case of trade name bullshittery, but, uh. Natural citrine is stupid rare. Most citrine these days used to be amethyst. Take a crappy piece of amethyst with faint color or gray tones and heat the hell out of it long enough, and it turns yellow, and you can legally sell it as citrine. If you’ve got citrine crystals and the yellow color is most intense up in the tips, you’ve almost certainly got former amethyst there. Fair warning.
So… yeah. Lot of trade names out there. Some of them total bupkis. Some only partly so. Heads up, and if you’re in the market for a gem or a crystal or something like that, do yourself a favor and look up the name somewhere reliable first just so you know what you’re buying.
How can they sell the heated amethyst as citrine? Is that not false advertisement?
Thank you for taking the time to type this up, op.
Today I learned that Van Halen have that rider in their contract about “a bowl of M&Ms with all the brown ones removed” in order to know at a glance if the promoter read the entire contract. And the reason they do THAT is because they once had a stage collapse because a promoter hadn’t read the proper way to set up all the specific technical stuff.
So if the band goes in the dressing room or catering and sees brown M&Ms, they know they have to double-check the stage setup for safety.
I heard about this on Freakonomics Radio. Turns out the bit about no brown M&Ms is HUGE, in BIG font, bold, underlined and quotated like they’re on the Group W Bench.
The band was all, “We have fifty-pound lights hanging over our heads and fire being shot out of cannons. We had to know whether they read our safety regs so we didn’t flamebroil any roadies.”
interesting how this has become a meme in the music industry about divas. i’ve always heard jokes that amount to “this stuck up celebrity hates the green gummy bears!! they’re refusing to perform just for that???” and its reading stuff like this that i realise how that joke might have come about. people get grumpy that the band refuses to play but cant admit its because THEY’RE incompetent, so they make it all about the M&Ms. another example of artists using a creative method to ensure they have a perfectly reasonable request fulfilled that is then bastardised by lazy people who wanna make money off them.
…this is like the music industry version of hearing the truth behind the McDonalds hot coffee lawsuit
Omer Gottesman, bored grad student working on his doctoral thesis at Harvard notices the geometry of crumpled paper and comes up with a theory which predicts complexity and even explains why we do not live forever.
As Mr. Gottesman crumpled, he scanned each sheet into his computer, and then, with an algorithm, he measured the sum total of all the creases. He found that if he crumpled two separate sheets, each sheet would, as expected, accumulate damage in a unique way. But the total crease lengths of the two sheets stayed remarkably similar. Length seemed to be a deterministic variable, a so-called state variable, predicting how the network of creases would evolve.
“The detailed history of the crumpling dynamics is written into the intricate pattern of creases,” Mr. Gottesman and his co-authors wrote. “No two crumpled sheets are identical.”
And yet the paper is effectively devoid of memory. At each state of crumple, the intricate crease patterns, and the events that led to them, are irrelevant. All that is needed to predict the paper’s next state is the total length of creases in the current one. “You just care about the current state,” Mr. Gottesman said.
A single-state philosophy
The news that crumpled paper obeys a state variable — or a crease law, or a damage law — has been received in the academy with wonderment and delight, since, as the authors noted, it represented “a remarkable reduction in complexity.”
I just kind of love how people are like “omg Incredibles 2 has swearing and alchohism it’s so dark and obviously meant for adults” like y’all, Brad Bird films are like this.
The first Incredibles literally had a man attempt to kill himself
also the swears are like “damn” and “hell” which aren’t really swears to begin with like i can think of ten other kids movies that have those words in them. call me when frozone says fuck or something then i’ll consider it
if you get home at night after work and discover that the able-bodied quasi-adults who were at home doing nothing but watch netflix all day have not even thought about making dinner or feeding the dogs or taking out the trash or emptying the dishwasher and have left it all for you to deal with then you’re allowed to be Less Than Happy
Iron in the Sand 