Yesterday, we took a break from the scorching summer heat with a look at some seasonal blues and greens: a cloud-gathering sky shading the growing corn. Today’s forecast is similarly hot, so for this week’s edition of Jewels and Gems, I thought we’d take a look at some more cooling blues, ones often touched with their own soft bright greens.
Our featured gemstone today is azurite, a beautiful marbled royal blue. It does present by itself, as plain azurite, and the etymology of the stone’s given name is obvious. But azurite most frequently manifests in a compound-mineral form, in conjunction with another gem we’ve covered here already: malachite. This is the form of azurite that, whether due to accessibility or simply an imposed market “preference,” has become the most common form used in jewelry and gemwork. It’s easy to see why: The intensely brilliant shades of green and blue, swirled together in one opaque stone, make for a gemstone that is both incredibly novel and yet very familiar. [There is also a third form of azurite, known colloquially as “Bluebird” for its deep-red cuprite matrix, resembling a bluebird’s combination of indigo and rusty-red feathers; this is the rarest form of azurite.]
These days, it’s easiest to find azurite (and azurite with malachite) in bead form. It’s more accessible in terms of cost, too; a large cabochon is likely much more difficult to find, and thus to be pricey, but strands of rondel beads such as those pictured here today are quite reasonably priced.
So what, exactly, is this beautiful stone that manifests in such intense hues?
Azurite is a secondary copper mineral, commonly found in copper deposits around the world. As we’ve noted here before, it’s another of the minerals that’s been extracted alongside turquoise at Bisbee’s famed copper mines. Azurite and malachite are the two basic copper carbonate minerals, formed over eons as deposits of copper ore slowly weather and oxidize. It’s why the two occur together so frequently. Malachite might be said to be the stronger, more dominant of the two minerals: Azurite is a very soft stone, disintegrates under high heat, and is less stable in open air than malachite is, which allows malachite to overtake it via a process we’ve discussed here many times, pseudomorphism. This is the means by which the malachite inclusions make their way into the azurite host (and, given just the right conditions and enough time, it can overtake it completely, creating a complete malachite pseudomorph of the original azurite). Under certain specific conditions, the two can combine in such as way as to form a single double-terminated crystal, one that is deep blue azurite on one end and bright green malachite on the other. Most often, however, azurite manifests in combination with malachite in a blocky, patchy pattern swirled together, as shown in the following close-up of azurite with malachite beads:
As you can see here, the two colors occur together, as though each bead is made of a wholly different third mineral in which the blue and green hues are simply an organic part of the same stone. Both also bear the same whitish inclusions of other matrix, giving them a marbled effect. For the azurite stones (or portions thereof), it’s a look that mimics the appearance of denim lapis. Another blue mineral that resembles azurite is the blue form of sodalite, which is a wholly different stone: Both often appear at first glance to be a pure royal blue, but when compared at points along the color spectrum, azurite usually carries slight hints of greenish undertones, while blue gem-grade sodalite often tends toward the purple end. In the close-up shown below of another strand of beads, you can see a few sections of solid azurite, with little to no malachite present:
The blues are intense — shades ranging from cornflower to cobalt to deep indigo — and the marbling effects of the wispy white matrices are clearly evident.
I said earlier that the etymology of the stone’s name, azurite, was obvious. That’s true, as far as it goes: It’s clearly from the same root as azure, a shade of bright blue. But, as is usually the case with language, it’s not that simple.
The name of the gemstone we call azurite ultimately comes from the same root as the name of another deep blue gemstone, lapis lazuli. Although we now tend to refer to the latter stone simply the first half of its name, lapis, that’s actually the least descriptive part of its name: Various sources identify it as nothing more than the Latin word for “stone.” The relevant part of the name is the second half, lazuli, which reportedly ultimately derives from the ancient Persian region known as Lazhward, where large deposits of lapis lazuli were mined. Eventually, via the colonizing, co-opting, and intermingling processes that influence changes in language, the Lazhward root was filtered through Arabic and eventually European tongues to arrive at azure — and thus, at azurite.
Azurite has a long and storied role in the art and gemwork of world history. A stone common to parts of Europe, it was ground into powder and used as a pigment for paints during the medieval era (and beyond). It also has an identity as a mimic and a fraud: Most of the lapis lazuli on the market during that period was mined only in what is now Afghanistan, necessitating a long and expensive trek along the Silk Road to reach European artists (and their wealthy patrons and collectors). It made lapis lazuli both inaccessible to most, and by its scarcity, highly prized, creating a black market for fake “lapis.” Europeans of the era regularly substituted azurite and simply called it lapis lazuli, and to the untrained eye, it was likely impossible to tell the difference most of the time. No doubt some never intended to pass off the one as the other, but were simply eager to believe that they had found something of such great value; others, of course, were simply unscrupulous, as has always been the case where human activity is concerned. As noted above, azurite disintegrates under high heat; it also turns black, which eventually made for an easy test to determine whether a blue stone or powder was in fact lapis lazuli or the more readily available and much less valuable azurite. [In Japan, however, artists developed a technique for heating azurite very slowly, under which circumstances it turns neither black nor to dust, but instead to a deeply intense, deeply brilliant shade of blue; it became a technique common to a particular school of Japanese painting.] But mimicry and mistaken identity notwithstanding, it made for a beautiful medium, and a beautiful pigment, one that presented across a fairly broad spectrum of blues, from gray-blue to green-blue to pure blue.
Azurite is found in locales as far-flung as Namibia and New Jersey. Because it occurs secondarily to copper, it’s found in most, if not all, of the major copper sources of the world, from North Africa to Australia to Europe to North America. Azurite sourced from one particular deposit is often known as Chessylite, because it comes from Chessy-les-Mines in the Lyon area of France. Here in the United States, the majority of it comes from sources in the Southwest: the copper mines of Arizona, Grant County in southwestern New Mexico, and a few counties in Utah. in recent years, azurite has been found in crust form in the Passaic Pit of New jersey’s Sussex County.
Given its presence in parts of the modern U.S. that have been inhabited by indigenous peoples for millennia, it’s likely that, for some of those peoples at some points int heir history, azurite did carry symbolic and/or spiritual significance. Whether that remains the case now is known only to those peoples for whom it might be a closely-held part of their traditions. For us, it’s simply a beautiful stone, one whose symbolic significance lies mostly in its appearance:
It is a stone of the green of the earth arising from the deep blue waters — a stone of the Big Blue Marble, of Turtle Island, of our Mother Earth.
~ Aji
[Note: At the moment, Wings has no pieces in inventory that are made with azurite, or azurite with malachite. The piece shown at the top of this post sold months ago, but the two strands of beads pictured in the center will, I suspect, make their way into upcoming pieces sooner rather than later. He has only one cabochon in his current inventory of stones, the small one pictured at the bottom of the post. It is, of course, available for turning into a commissioned piece, should you wish to go a little green on your own personal Big Blue Marble.]
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2015; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owners.
