Favorite Gemstones

Agate - Agate is a variety of chalchedony silicate with curved banding. They come in a wide array of colors and the banding produces a lot of beautiful patterns.

Amber - Amber is a lovely gemstone that looks stunning on purely aesthetic grounds, forms in a unique and interesting way, and carries symbolic significance. Amber is beautifully translucent, has a beautiful honey-like color, and contains air pockets and other so-called imperfections which give it a unique visual texture. Being fossilized tree sap, amber conjures up images of bygone life and symbolically represents preservation.

Amethyst - Amethyst was my favorite gemstone for a long time. I'm a slut for anything purple, so that immediately gives it bonus points. It was one of the first gemstones I ever interacted with as it's my birthstone and someone gave me some as a birthday gift when I was a kid, so there's also points for nostalgia. The natural color variation in purple amethyst adds variety across samples and interesting visual texture in individual samples. The fact that it changes color when heated and develops an orange color is also interesting to me. It was also once thought to stave off drunkenness which I find funny.

Cubic Zirconia - Cubic Zirconia is often seen as a cheap replacement for diamond, and it often is, but I don't see that as a bad thing. Diamond does have unique properties that it should be lauded for, but its high pricing is due largely to controlled supply and artificially inflated cultural significance. Diamond is a status symbol without commensurate real value, and I think that if it can be imitated at a lower price, we really ought to do that.

Diamond - Diamond is such a basic choice for a gemstone, and there's a lot I don't like about them in terms of their place in our society, but as an object devoid of that context, it's a very cool gem. It's incredibly hard and thermally conductive, both properties that make it useful in industrial settings. It also has great variety in color despite only few possible impurities while in its purest form having a very simple chemical structure of only densely-packed carbon atoms. That said, the marketing of diamonds as a rare stone making them incredibly overpriced, their intentional profit-driven entanglement with western culture's idea of marriage, and their relationship with massively unethical companies and other organizations are all factors that stain diamond's reputation in my head. tl;dr fuck DeBeers, shout-out lab-grown diamonds.

Bloodstone - Bloodstone is a name ascribed to a variety of different stones from across the world. I group them all in here because I like all of them for the same reason. I consider blood to have high spiritual significance, and I think the visual appeal of this sort of stone reflects that. Bloodstone typically has red alongside a darker base color, and that contrast is visually striking. In addition to perceiving the bright red more readily than the dark backing color, our brains are tuned to look more closely for red precisely because of its association with blood and flesh. Anything which causes something to bleed likely demands our attention. In fewer unnecessary words, I like blood, so I like bloodstone.

Jade - Jade as a term really refers to two different classes of stone, and even within those stones, there is great diversity. This variety allows jade to be used for many varied purposes from jewelry to sculpture to teaware. I have an affinity for jade as I've seen a lot of beautiful jade art in my time learning about China, and it also just appeals to me as a substance. It has translucency which I always love, comes most typically in green which is among my favorite colors, and has color variety. Purple jade also exists which instantly boosts jade's estimation in my mind given my love of purple.

Onyx - Onyx is a variety of chalchedony silicate with parallel banding as opposed to the curved bands of agate. This results in stones with an almost hypnotic effect. This, similarly to opals, appeal to my love of apparent "fractal" patterns that suggest seemingly infinite depth. It also tends to come in either black and white or red and white in a form called sardonyx. This gives it less color variety than its sister agate, but the restricted color range with colors that sharply contrast each other produces striking patterns.

Opal - Opals are a very wide class of stone and some common opal are more normal rock than gemstone, but that said, even those ones are pretty, and that variety adds to the coolness of opal in my opinion. The fact that precious opal are iredescent, and like being purple, that is pretty much an instant way to my heart. I love iredescence; mother of pearl is another one of my favorite materials. One of my favorite types of opal is dendritic opal, which as the name implies has tree-like patterns. These patterns also resemble fractals more generally which looks cool and appeals to me especially as fractals are a part of my spiritual beliefs. Some other favorites are jelly opal, which is translucent and has a gelatinous-looking texture, black opal, which has a black body with bright iredescent streaks, and hydrophane opal, which can absorb water and become more clear in doing so.

Pearl - Pearls are an automatic inclusion in my favorites list on the basis of their production. Given that most gemstones are formed in the Earth over periods of millions of years, the fact that pearls can be formed within mollusks in their short lifespan is miraculous. The fact that they naturally form into perfect, little spheres as well as having wide color variety in such a short period of time is truly special.

Tanzanite - Tanzanite is an amazingly unique gem that happens to come in many of my favorite colors. It's pleochroic, meaning that it has multiple colors which vary depending on how light hits it. Depending on how it's heat-treated, it can be either dichroic with blue and violet or trichroic with blue, violet, and red. It can also rarely become green with a secondary blue or violet hue. It's a very new gemstone in terms of human discovery as it was only found in 1968. Tanzanite has never been synthesized and is only found in northern Tanzania, so it's a true natural wonder.