Turquoise Jewelry

Turquoise Jewelry - If you were born in December your birthstone is turquoise, a gem created from copper and aluminum whose color is appropriately a turquoise hue. The color turquoise can usually be described as a sort of bluish green mixture, but when we describe it such we’re talking about the most common and generic type of turquoise that most people are familiar with. Low value kinds of turquoise tend to have pale blue or have their surfaces contaminated with green or yellow color. They are also softer, more easily broken and unpolished in appearance. The rarest and most valuable turquoise actually comes in more of a polished deep robin’s egg blue color and has an extremely hard surface. The value of turquoise can be determined quite easily by how it looks and feels, and it’s hard, deep blue turquoise that’s used in fine turquoise jewelry.

Turquoise jewelry has been worn and valued for thousands of years. Ancient Egyptian royalty wore turquoise jewelry even to their burial tombs and the Native Americans used turquoise for many purposes such as religious ceremonies and trading. Turquoise jewelry was valuable in a spiritual way as well as in a monetary sense. The fact that we call this gemstone “turquoise” may have specifically arisen from the Turks who brought it to Europe from the Eastern Mediterranean, but turquoise was and is relevant to various cultures across continents. Many people considered turquoise to be a stone of vitality that could help alleviate disease and promote harmony. As a result, it was used extensively in jewelry and art carvings, it was used in trade, and it was even ground into a powder and ingested as medicine for stomach aches and internal bleeding.

Today, turquoise is still considered valuable and turquoise jewelry is a popular choice of accessory, ranging from simple trinkets to elaborate and authentic pieces. They can come in different styles like more traditional Native American and Asian-influenced items, or modern and contemporary turquoise jewelry. Turquoise jewelry is widely available—you can find it at your local jeweler or you can browse through countless turquoise jewelry catalogs online. If you’re looking for more contemporary jewelry like a trendy necklace or ring, you’ll probably be more likely to find it at the local jeweler, while the internet is full of many novelty selections like Native American charms that you would be hard pressed to find at a public store, but there are still many contemporary selections online as well.