A Rainbow of Color: Garnet Mineral Collection

Sorry for the misunderstanding.  You quoted me though with your response, which is why I thought you were giving me a hard time.

They were found close to Las Vegas.  My friend and I were out hiking about 6 years ago and I ran across a part of the mountain where there were some of these and small chunks of a gray, frothy appearance obsidian on the ground.  So I picked up as many as I could find.  I examined the obsidian under the stereoscope and found that the appearance was due to being heavily micro-fractured.  I have not been back since, but am thinking about going back to see if the heavy rains have uncovered anymore.

Look who's talking!!!

That's why I don't here often. To many pricks like you are only interested in arguing and can care less about the facts.  Like the poster a while back who wanted to argue that the stone I had could not be variscite because it was harder than most variscite.  Variscite can contain chert or chalcedony making a harder stone:

www.mindat.org/article.php/1670/Variscite

He also claimed that variscite is never found with turquoise, which was also wrong.

Nice collection and very well described.

A human mole. Great photo. True rock lover.

Nature does not always follow the rules we think it should.

A while back I was out in the California deserts looking for meteorites.  I ran across two oval stones several inches long that were heavy and magnetic.  When I cut the one stone open it looked just like the Eagle's Nest brachinite meteorite so I sent it off to a meteoric lab for testing.  It also turned out to be garnet.  So garnet does not always form with crystal faces.

Gingerkid, nope not yet. I don't have equipment plus they are all pretty small. I'd like to eventually get some of the ones I got from Emerald Creek cabbed to see if they have stars.

My focus is on pretty garnets, the kinds that can be used in jewelry. All 20 or so species of garnets are interesting but only five of them are generally used in jewelry. But those five offer a very wide range of color and property differences because of what’s called “miscibility.”

In other words, certain garnet species frequently mix with each other in variable proportions and create a nearly inexhaustible number of color, saturation and tone possibilities. They also vary in terms of brilliance and rainbow-like “fire.”

An example is the grossular garnet species. It has major miscibility relationships with the uvarovite species and the andradite species. It can also mix with almandine and its intermediate varieites. Due to such mixing grossular has the widest range of hues of any garnet type. It varies from near-colorless (Leuco garnet) through pale green (generally misnamed “Merelani Mint”), intense green (trade-named Tsavorite), orange-red (Hessonite or Cinnamon Stone), yellow (not named to my knowledge) and pink (Rosolite.)

Another name for grossular (which is blended mainly with andradite) is Mali Garnet. Because sorting out the actual chemistry of garnets can be very difficult, many garnet types are simply named after the areas where they’re found, in this case the nation of Mali in west Africa. The majority of Mali garnet is plain grossular (which takes its name from the greenish-yellow color of gooseberries.) But some is blended with andradite which gives it unusual hues and brilliance.

This is Mali garnet gem-grade faceting rough. Some is greener and some trends toward the orangy-brown.



This is a faceted Mali garnet representing the yellow grossular hue:



This Mali grossular, with a large percentage of andradite, displays visible “fire” or dispersion, typical of that species.

Don, garnet crystals like these are frequently found in waterworn alluvial deposits. The in situ Mali garnets occur in what are known as porphyroblasts, similar to their grossular cousin Tsavorite. Their isometric singly-refractive crystallization is easily confirmed with a polariscope or dichroscope

gingerkid, I don't have any equipment so not gonna happen anytime soon unfortunately.