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Lapis Lazuli Stone

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Lapis Lazuli is another stone that has been in high favor for ornamental purposes over thousands of years. It owes its popularity to its intense purplish-blue color which is utterly resistant to fading in sunlight. It has been used to make inlays, figurines, seals of both cylindrical and flat shapes, scarabs, beads and pendants, but it is not wholly suitable as a ring stone since it only has hardness of 6 and is subject to corrosion by chemicals.

Its use as a pigment in the past is famous. Though apparently of even color, it can be separated into particles which differ slightly in hue. These are then graded and ground to a fine powder which is the painters' color ultramarine. Many ancient pictures owe their still luminous blues to it, but nowadays a synthetic pigment is used instead.

Lapis Lazuli is a rock rather than a mineral. Its blue constituents are supplied by an isomorphous series of aluminum silicates, the chief of which is hauynite. This is partly replaced by three closely related minerals, lazurite, sodalite and nosean. In addition lapis lazuli contains white or grey calcite, yellow metallic specks of pyrite and minor admixtures of other minerals. The name of this stone seems to have originated in the Middle Ages: 'lapis' means stone and 'lazuli' is driven from the Arabic word for blue.

An imitation of long standing has been a porous jasper stained blue and marked as 'Swiss lapis'. This does not show the yellow specks of pyrite and soon loses its color in wear. A more recent imitation is in synthetic blue spinel in which the manufactures have gone to the extraordinary length of counterfeiting the pyrite specks in pure gold! A poor quality of lapis lazuli, matted grey and blue in color, comes from Chile; minor deposits are on Lake Baikal in Siberia; in Upper Burma; in the Sawatch Range of Colorado and in San Bernardino County, California.

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