TURQUOISE

Turquoise is an opaque, blue-to-green mineral, characterised by a uniform colour or occasionally by dark veins, which often create a unique structural pattern. Used since ancient times as a precious and ornamental stone, turquoise had great importance in pre-Columbian, Mediterranean and Asian cultures, where it was thought to have magical and therapeutic properties.
The first historical artefact in turquoise is a bracelet found in Egypt from over 8,000 years ago. Even in the past, the most used cuttings were cabochons, with a curved and smooth surface.
The porosity of turquoise often causes alterations in colour, above all if it comes into contact with perfume and acidic substances. For that reason, turquoise is sometimes treated or enhanced to a certain degree to preserve its colour. Reconstituted turquoise is, therefore, more resistant to colour alterations, but it has, obviously, a lower market value. It is made through a mixture of turquoise powder and resins which reduce its porosity and make the piece easier to process.
The most important turquoise mines are in Arizona and Nevada, in Mexico, Peru, China, Tibet, Iran, Africa, Turkey and Australia.
Even today turquoise is very appreciated in the jewellery industry, above all to make carvings and little statues with a huge market value, and smooth stones of different sizes and dimensions, with a blue-to-green-colour and a great shimmer.

Sleeping Beauty

The Sleeping Beauty Turquoise is a quality of turquoise from Globe mines in Arizona, one of the most important turquoise mines in the world. The name of this gemstone derives from the shape of the mountains where it has been mined and which resembles a sleeping woman laying on her back with crossed arms, that is to say a “sleeping beauty”.
First found by the Native Americans during the Anasazi time, the Sleeping Beauty Turquoise was traded in all the US and, in the shape of nuggets or cabochons, it immediately became a fundamental material for local jewelry production. Then, the famous Sleeping Beauty Turquoise was re-discovered by accident during the second half of the last century, by some miners in search for copper and gold. Currently, this kind of turquoise is internationally renowned and widely appreciated for its pure light blue colour and no black inner matrix. Thus, the stone is widely used in the jewelry world.
The Sleeping Beauty Turquoise quality is characterized by an exceptional light blue shade which recalls the colour of the sky in a sunny day. The uniqueness of the gemstone is due to the incredible brightness, the natural compactness and the purity of the stone colour, which confers the material a high manufacturing value and increases the market demand of it. The darker the colour is, the rarer the stones are. However, Sleeping Beauty Turquoise natural colour is not a deep blue, but a light sky-blue nuance, which is also the most perfect and required one, both by jewelers and consumers.
Nowadays, the availability of the Sleeping Beauty Turquoise is very limited because of the increasing demand of this stone, which cannot be sustained by diminished rough material provisions and reduced mine resources.