Garnet Colors: Get to Know Garnet, from Deep Red to Green

What garnet is

Garnet is red. It is also orange, green, purple and a pale champagne, and the red alone runs from a bright cherry to a wine so dark it reads as black. That range exists because garnet is not one mineral. It is a family of closely related silicates that share a single crystal structure and swap the metals inside it, and each swap is a different species with its own color. Almandine and pyrope are the reds, spessartine is the orange, grossular carries the greens and the cinnamon tones, and the trade names on a strand, rhodolite, tsavorite, mandarin, hydrogrossular, are varieties within those species.

Two facts hold across the whole family. Garnet sits at 6.5 to 7.5 on the Mohs scale, hard enough for daily wear. And it is one of the few colored stones that reaches the market untreated in nearly every case, so the color on a strand of garnet beads is the color the rough came out of the ground with. Garnet is the January birthstone, and the deep red is the version most people picture. The other colors are where the family gets interesting for design.

A short history of garnet

The name comes from the medieval Latin granatus, pomegranate, for the resemblance between a red garnet crystal and the seeds of the fruit. Garnet has been cut and worn since the Bronze Age. Red garnet necklaces were buried with the pharaohs of Egypt. In Rome, garnet intaglios were set in signet rings and pressed into the wax that sealed documents, and by the first century red garnet was among the most widely traded gems in the empire.

The high point of garnet as a maker's material is the early Middle Ages. In the seventh-century ship burial at Sutton Hoo in England, more than four thousand garnets were cut into thin plates and set into gold cells, a technique called garnet cloisonné, to form mosaic surfaces on the purse lid, the shoulder clasps and the sword fittings. Analysis of those stones traces the almandine to India and Sri Lanka. A red stone mined in South Asia, traded across two continents and cut by Anglo-Saxon goldsmiths is the same species that fills most red garnet strands today.

Garnet's second era came from Bohemia, in the modern Czech Republic. Pyrope deposits found there around 1500 grew into a regional jewelry industry that peaked in the late 1800s, when small bright-red Bohemian garnets, set edge to edge in clusters, were the fashion of Victorian Europe. Most of the world's garnet now comes from Africa, with India and Sri Lanka still producing, and the varieties below were all named as new deposits opened, from 1832 to 2016.

Garnet colors and types, and which ones come as beads

The garnet family covers nearly every color, and four of those colors are common enough as beads to build with: red, orange, green and purple.

Red garnet: almandine, pyrope and rhodolite

Red is the garnet of the record and of the bead trade. Almandine is the iron-rich species, deep wine to burgundy, often with a brown undertone, and it is the stone in nearly every strand sold simply as red garnet. Pyrope is the magnesium species, a clearer red without the brown, the Bohemian garnet of the Victorian clusters. Rhodolite sits between them, a pyrope-almandine blend named in 1898 from a deposit in North Carolina for the rose in its color. It is pinker and more transparent than almandine and rarely labelled on a bead strand, so a red strand with a raspberry cast deserves a second look.

Garnet has a high refractive index, and faceting shows it. Faceted rondelles and microfaceted rounds throw a deep red sparkle that a smooth polish only hints at, while smooth rounds read darker and closer to velvet. Red garnet beads run from 2mm faceted coins and 3mm cubes through 6mm and 8mm rounds, with rondelles, nuggets, hearts, energy prisms and large-hole rounds between. In a piece, red garnet holds its own against gold, sits well with smoky quartz and carnelian, and gives a strand of pearls or clear quartz one point of dark color. See the red garnet beads.

Orange garnet: spessartine, mandarin and champagne

Orange garnet is spessartine, the manganese species, named in 1832 for the Spessart hills in Bavaria where it was first described. Its color runs from a reddish orange through true orange to a bright tangerine, and the brightest of it, found in 1991 near the Kunene river in Namibia, was given the trade name mandarin garnet. Hessonite, the cinnamon-orange variety of grossular, is the other orange in the family, and on a bead strand the two are sold under one name, orange garnet. At the pale end of the same range sits a straw-to-tea tint sold as champagne garnet.

Orange garnet beads come as 3mm faceted rounds and table-cut cubes, 4mm coins and microfaceted rounds, 6mm, 8mm and 10mm rounds, graduated faceted rondelles, pebbles and side-drilled pebbles, and large-hole rounds. In a piece, orange garnet is the warm accent in an autumn palette, runs into red garnet in a graduated strand, and against black or dark green stones it carries the color of the whole design. See the orange garnet beads.

Green garnet: grossular, tsavorite and hydrogrossular

Green garnet is grossular, the calcium species. Its best-known variety is tsavorite, a bright green colored by chromium and vanadium. Campbell Bridges found it in Tanzania in 1967 and again across the border in Kenya in 1970, and in 1974 it took its name from Tsavo, the park near the Kenyan deposits, in a naming agreed with Tiffany & Co. Gem-grade tsavorite is transparent and cut as small stones. Bead-grade tsavorite and the wider run of green grossular are translucent, and some of it shows fine banding, a mineral striping that marks the natural stone rather than a flaw.

Hydrogrossular is the massive, opaque form of the same species, colored by chromium and often flecked with dark chromite, mined in the Bushveld of South Africa, where it has long been sold as Transvaal jade or African jade. It is the one garnet that reads as a jade, and it comes as smooth rounds from 4mm to 10mm.

Green garnet beads come as 3mm faceted rounds and table-cut cubes, 4mm faceted rounds, 6mm star-cut coins, 8mm rondelles and rounds, and 7.5mm tsavorite rounds. In a piece, green garnet gives a design its emerald note without emerald's fragility, pairs with red garnet for the classic two-color garnet strand, and sits well beside gold and dark wood. See the green garnet beads.

Purple garnet

Purple garnet is the newest color in the family. It is a pyrope-almandine, a chemical cousin of rhodolite, from Manica province in Mozambique, and it reached the market in 2016. GIA's laboratory found that the stone transmits blue and red light together, which is why it reads as grape under cool light and shifts toward cranberry under warm light. It comes as 3mm table-cut cubes, 4mm microfaceted rounds and 6mm faceted hearts, in small quantities. In a piece it is a strong accent beside amethyst and silver, and a quiet one beside the darker reds. See the purple garnet beads.

Every garnet color above arrives the same way: untreated, hard enough for daily wear, and denser than it looks, so a strand has weight in the hand. The deep red is the one people know. The full range is red, orange, green and purple, and all four are in the garnet collection.

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