Emerald Phantom

Sometime between about 1.85 billion and 830 million years ago, sand and lime settled in layers on a shallow continental shelf in what is now central Madagascar. Mats of microbes grew over the lime and built stromatolites in it. The first large, complex living things appeared in the sea much later, about 575 million years ago.

The layers were buried, folded and heated. The sand hardened into quartzite and the lime into marble, and new zircon grew in the rock as it changed, around 830 million years ago. Those rocks now form the Itremo massif, and thousands of quartz veins run through them.

Later, warm water moved through cracks in the rock. In one opening, silicon and oxygen began to come out of it and lock together on the wall in the trigonal pattern of quartz. A crystal had started, building a clear six-sided prism with a pointed end.

While its faces were still open to the water, flakes of a green mica settled on them. The mica is fuchsite, a muscovite in which chromium has taken the place of some of the aluminium, and the chromium makes it green. It is soft, about 2 to 3 on the Mohs scale. The flakes gathered thickly on some faces and hardly at all on others.

Then the quartz grew again. New silica spread across the dusted faces and closed over the fuchsite. What had been the outside of the crystal became a surface inside it, a green outline of the earlier prism and its point. The quartz inside the outline is older than the quartz around it.

In 2009 Nathan Renfro, at GIA's laboratory in Carlsbad, California, examined a polished quartz crystal from Madagascar with a phantom drawn in small green clusters. Crystals like it had been sold with the green called celadonite, fuchsite or chlorite. With the owner's permission he ground part of the crystal down until the green reached the surface, and he read it with a Raman microscope. It was fuchsite.

In 2019 Gabriela Farfan and Jeffrey Post, at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, looked at another of these crystals with an electron microscope. The green was made of tiny sheets, the shape a mica takes, gathered in small clusters along a sharp, thin phantom where the crystal's faces had once been.

To make a bead, a cutter rounds the rough and grinds the outer faces away. The cut passes through the buried outline at a different angle in each bead: an arch in one, a straight green edge in the next, a faint band near the centre in another. The quartz around the green is about 7 on the Mohs scale, and where fuchsite reaches the surface of a bead, that spot is softer.

On the wrist a soft green line or arch sits inside clear quartz. Turn the bead and the outline moves, sharp at one angle and faint at the next. That green is fuchsite, left on the faces of the crystal before the last of its quartz grew over them.

The emerald phantom quartz in our strands comes from Brazil and is untreated. Its green is fuchsite too. Each strand comes with a Stone Origin Record.

One way to read this: collectors call the green outline inside a phantom. It is an earlier face of the same crystal, dusted with fuchsite, and the quartz went on growing over it in the same shape, larger. The earlier crystal is still inside the later one, the same shape, and you can see it.

Let it through. The meaning is yours.