Tanzanite Necklace | Buyers Guide

Tanzanite - This relatively new gemstone discovered in 1967 has joined the turquoise and Zircon as one of the official birthstones for December.

The stone is named after its birthplace Tanzania discovered by Manuel d'Souza who was originally looking for sapphire. Tanzanite is only located in this one part of the world making it a very rare gem.

Tanzanite displays a trichroic appearance - meaning that when looked at in different angles it will display different color gradients. This makes tanzanite a very unique and beautiful gem

Unfortunately the raw material is far less attractive, In its raw state tanzanite is usually a reddish brown color. Which is actually quite astonishing how it comes out the beautiful blue that it does. But through an intense heat treatment (Temperatures stemming up to 600 °C) the blue violet color stars to shine.

Lets breakdown what you should look for in not just a tanzanite necklace but just about any necklace that you would buy. The necklace is broken down into two qualities: The chain, and the gem that is on the chain.

The chain - Depending on your spending budget you may want to invest into a good quality chain. This is very important because how can you have a necklace without a chain? Also in getting a cheap chain you would degrade the value of the overall product, provided that you got a decent gem.

Some of the metals that would make a good gem would be white gold, platinum, and silver. If you are on a really tight budget I would suggest white gold. It isn't very expensive and looks very nice.

The gem - On the Mohs scale tanzanite ranks 6.5-7 making it a pretty valuable gem. The stone can appear to be purple, blue, or a yellow brown color depending on the angle it is looked at. The cleavage of the gemstone faces only one direction making it very difficult for gem cutters to deal with.

The tanzanite gem should never come in contact with any kinds of acids. The gem also isn't really what you would call durable in any sense.

You can get some more information on the Tanzanite necklace at my site