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January Birthstone Jewelry and Rings

garnet Natural Garnet
Birthstone of January. Deep red colors.
emerald Natural Emerald
Another birthstone for January. We have beautiful affordable natural emeralds.
The January birthstone, garnet, is not a single stone, but rather a group of minerals with similar chemical composition. There are many types of garnet, including pyrope, uvarovite, demantoid, almandine, andradite, spessartite, and grossular (which includes hessonite - also called cinnamon-stone - and tsavorite).

Gemstones from these minerals can vary in color, including red, blue, green, yellow, brown, black, pink, orange, and colorless. The rarest garnet is the color-changing blue garnet, which changes colors from a blue-green in daylight to a purple in incandescent light, and which wasn't discovered until the late 1990s in Madagascar. This color changing property is not unique to the blue garnet, however. Other types of garnet display similar daylight/incandescent light transformations as well, but the blue is the most rare. Red is by far the most common, followed by green, yellow, and orange.

Garnet is found in many places around the world and each location provides its own set of colors to the garnet family. Russia provided the renowned designer Carl Faberge with the beautiful green demantoid garnets that he so often used in his work. The United States, where the red rhodolite garnets were originally found, produces stones that are often referred to in the market as Arizona ruby, New Mexico ruby, and Montana ruby. However, the majority of these red stones are now produced in India, East Africa, and Sri Lanka.

The US Geological Survey states that 14 states in the US produce garnet. However, while the United States produces tens of millions of dollars worth of garnet, only a tiny fraction of that amount is gem-grade. The rest is industrial grade garnet, which was originally used for a sandpaper application, but is now used in many abrasive applications because of garnet's natural hardness. This garnet is sold into a worldwide market of about 110,000 tons, annually. Because of this most garnet jewelry in the United States is made with imported garnet stones.

Garnets have been used in jewelry for thousands of years. Early Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans used garnet in their jewelry, and garnet was often used for protection in talismans because it was thought to protect the wearer from evil. More recently, the 18th and 19th centuries saw high demand for the fiery red pyrope, which had been found in the former kingdom of Bohemia. These stones were often worked into jewelry in clusters of many smaller stones during the Victorian period - a tradition that is carried on today with stones found in the former Czechoslovakia.

The ancient garnet is a beautiful and lasting stone because of its high rating on the Mohs scale (7 to 7.5) and because of its high refractive index. It's highly sought-after because of its natural beauty, range of colors, and ease of crafting by skilled jewelers.

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"My jewelry is handcrafted by me at time of order. Custom requests are welcome."
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I love my ruby ring. Best birthday gift I got for myself :-)
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