The birthstone from outer space!
By Chloe Tomasik - 02/08/2007
August's birthstone, the Peridot, is a fabulous, gorgeous green gem ranging in colour from bright lettuce to olive green. It is found in outer space and comes down to earth embedded in meteorites - which makes it literally out of this world.
At some time in the past, millions have spewed out of Hawaii's volcanoes and fallen on the beaches, where they can be crunched underfoot - but they are rarely big enough for jewellery.
Peridot is one of our oldest gems, having been mined in 1500 BC on the volcanic island of St John in the Red Sea. The name comes from the Arabic ‘Faridat’, and one of the great joy of peridots to the ancient world was that they did not change their colour in the dark: in fact, they were often called "emeralds of the night."
The Ancient Egyptians were so desperate to keep the source of these stones hidden that the island was heavily guarded to prevent the miners leaving, and when the island’s indigenous poisonous snakes slowed down the mining the snakes were slaughtered so that miners had no excuse to slack! Incredibly, the Egyptians successfully managed to keep the island’s precious gems a secret from Biblical times right up to the 17th Century.
Now, with the mines virtually exhausted, the main source of modern peridots is far less exotic. They are mined all over the world from Australia, Burma, China, India and the USA, with the Apache reservation in Arizona producing 80% of the world's peridots. In 1994 a new source was found high up in the Himalayas in the Pakistan part of Kashmir, and this area produces especially fine stones - so much so that there is talk of calling them Kashmir peridots (as wonderful coloured sapphires are called Kashmir sapphires) to denote their quality.
Peridots are considered semi-precious stones and as such aren’t associated with the greed, poison and lust of some of the more valuable gems. In fact everyone seems to have had a good word for them. They were originally brought to Europe by the crusaders and used a lot in Church artefacts. Even pirates apparently appreciated them, burying their treasure with them, so that when they came back to look for their loot the bright glow of the peridots would show them where to dig.
They were popular in both traditional Victorian jewellery mixed with pearls or diamonds and in the breakaway Arts and Craft movement at the end of the Victorian era. They were also frequently the green stone in the suffragette jewellery of the 1900s - suffragette colours being violet, green and white, and green being the colour of hope.
Peridots have also been a favourite of the apothecary for hundreds of years, as it was considered to be a healing stone. Powdered peridot was supposedly good for cooling fevers, easing gall bladder and liver problems and helping asthma attacks. A stone worn on the right arm and set in gold (according to Pliny the Elder) protected the wearer from nightmares, but tied on the left arm with an ass’s hair it could protect the wearer from evil. And if the stone was engraved with the figure of an ass it could give the wearer prophetic powers.
Wearing peridots is supposed to encourage love, luck, prosperity and promote emotional well-being. So it's a good stone to wear!
On a practical level, peridots, are a little softer than emeralds measuring 6.5 to 7 on the Mohs scale of hardness. They don’t like extreme temperatures so wash carefully in warm soapy water and don’t use steam or ultrasonic cleaners.