Mineral Mondays - Green Copper Turquoise

This is green copper turquoise, a bit of an oxymoron really, like jumbo shrimp or working vacation. How can turquoise be green? But we're talking about the stone and not the color so it turns out that it can.

Copper is what gives regular turquoise its color, but when there is iron present, the result is green turquoise.

I hadn't intended to go to a jewellery show. We had come from a car show and this smaller one was right across the hall in the same building. And what an interesting experience. You were given a tray and that was the only place you could put the jewellery to look at it or carry it around. And there were cameras everywhere and a guard at the door.

Most of the jewellery was made from precious and semi-precious stones, and heavily discounted if you believe the original sticker prices. I thought I might replace a missing Labradorite earring and ended up coming out with several things.

Things became interesting as I was doing research for this post. While I believe this is real turquoise from Nevada, there are many imitations and even natural turquoise might be treated to stabilize it or enhance its color. Was that done to these pieces? We will never know but it's pretty green jewellery.

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References

Identifying Turquoise

Images

Photos from the Canon SX620 HS of @kansuze.

@kansuze