GARNETS

Garnets are a set of closely related minerals forming a group, with gemstones in almost every colour.

Red garnets have a long history, but modern gem buyers can pick from a rich palette of garnet colours: greens, oranges, pinkish oranges, deeply saturated purplish reds, and even some blues.

Red garnet is one of the most common and widespread of gems. But not all garnets are as abundant as the red ones. A green garnet, called Tsavorite, is rarer and needs rarer rock chemistries and 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 the colour-change phenomenon similar to the rare gemstone alexandrite.

All garnets have essentially the same crystal structure, but they vary in chemical composition. There are more than twenty garnet categories, called species, but only five are commercially important as gems.

Garnet is the Birthstone for January.