Garnet is a huge family of natural gemstones, possibly the largest there is. Garnet colors and prices are all over the place. The typical specimen that you see in garnet birthstone jewelry is the slightly reddish brown stone of a dark tone. It is called almandite garnet and is inexpensive enough that it is commonly used in commercial colored stone jewelry and garnet jewelry sets and is on par with amethyst and blue topaz in terms of price. In fact it is so inexpensive that silver garnet jewelry is preferred by people who wear garnet
Victorian Garnet Ring
because the cost of It’s deep reddish rust color is not the most attractive color for a gemstone but it does have its share of fans apart from the the January birthstone aficionados.
The typical garnet jewelry set can use a variety of garnets apart from almandite garnet. The second most popular garnet is rhodolite garnet. It is light to dark purplish red through reddish purple and is quite available making rhodolite garnet jewelry the second most popular garnet jewelry. Most people don’t recognize this stone as a garnet because the predominant thinking is that garnets come only in dark red colors. Indeed the term garnet today is seen by dealers as referring to the ugliness in color of any red gen including ruby. If a dealer wants to malign the color of a ruby, they will refer to it as “garnet like” or say it looks like garnet jewelry..
The regular garnet that is seen in commercial jewelry typically has heavy secondaries of brown and purple which are considered unattractive. Then there was a massive amount of cheap garnet jewelry production in the mid 1800s to early 1900s with Victorian era styling that exploded onto the market in America and the UK. This antique garnet jewelry using both the brown tinged almandine garnet and purple tinged pyrope garnet became known for low priced mass manufactured jewelry and was effectively termed “the poor man’s ruby”. Garnet’s reputation as an unattractive, very dark red stone found in grandmother’s rings was partly fueled by this vintage garnet jewelry that seemed to be everywhere.
It wasn’t till Art deco took hold of the jewelry world in the mid 1900s that the African chromium variety with its burning red color began to be used in bohemian garnet jewelry that garnet’s reputation began to take a slight upswing.
Tsavorite garnet jewelry is all about the green stone that could. Tsavorite came on the gem market in the early 1970s and it’s beguiling green color was close to that of emerald except for the extra tinge of blue that the finest colored emeralds have. Tsavorite was harder, more brilliant and had a rich green color that was made all the more apparent by the fact that tsavorite hardly had any inclusions.
Tsavorite Octagon Gemstone
For the most part this green garnet had a low level of imperfections in commercially mined material in much the same way that aquamarine does while emerald is a gemstone that is hard to find clean specimens. Because of its hardiness it became a popular green stone for use in mens garnet jewelry as opposed to the fragile emerald. Gold garnet jewelry using tsavorite seemed to be a match made in heaven because this gemstone’s slightly yellowish tinge was greatly complimented by yellow gold.
