Lapis Lazuli Color and Grades: Get to Know Lapis, from Royal Blue to Denim

What lapis lazuli is

Lapis lazuli is a rock, not a single mineral. The blue comes from lazurite, which makes up roughly a quarter to 40 percent of the stone; a rock needs about a quarter lazurite to be called lapis at all. Around the lazurite sit calcite, the white veining, and pyrite, the gold flecks, with sodalite and a few other minerals mixed through in smaller amounts. Every strand of lapis lazuli beads is some proportion of those four, and the proportion is what the grade describes.

Lapis sits at 5 to 5.5 on the Mohs scale, soft for a gemstone and slightly porous, so it belongs in earrings, necklaces and bracelets rather than everyday rings, and it is cleaned with a soft cloth rather than an ultrasonic. The color that gives the stone its name, a saturated royal blue with gold in it, has been the reference blue of the gem world for as long as there has been a gem trade.

Where lapis lazuli comes from

Most of the world's fine lapis has come from one place: the Sar-e-Sang mines in the Badakhshan region of northeastern Afghanistan, worked for more than 6,000 years and among the oldest gem mines in the world. Smaller commercial deposits sit in the Andes of Chile, where the material tends lighter with more calcite, and near Lake Baikal in Russia.

The stone traveled early. Lapis inlays form the eyebrows and the eye lines of Tutankhamun's gold funerary mask, and by his time the stone had been reaching Egypt from Afghanistan for more than a thousand years. Ground to powder and washed, lapis became ultramarine, "from beyond the sea," the blue that medieval and Renaissance painters kept for the robes of the Virgin. The best grades of the pigment cost more than gold by weight, and a patron often paid for the ultramarine in a painting separately from the painter's fee.

Lapis has never been a stone with many sources, and the range on the market comes mostly from how the rough is sorted and cut rather than from where it was mined. That is why the grade matters more for lapis than for most beads.

How lapis lazuli is graded

Lapis is graded on the blue. Ricky walks through it strand by strand in the video, and the main points are written out below it.

The gold flecks are pyrite, and they mark the real stone

The metallic gold specks in lapis are pyrite, scattered through the rock as small grains. Pyrite running through the body of a bead, not sitting only on its surface, is the surest sign of real lapis. Sodalite, and the dyed howlite and jasper sometimes sold as lapis, carry none. Small, fine pyrite does not lower the grade; the fine blue material has some. Heavy pyrite does lower it, and pushes the color toward a dull green.

Dyed and waxed lapis

Calcite and pale zoning make the blue uneven, so some lapis in the trade is dyed to deepen and even out the color, and some is waxed to seal the porous surface. Dyed lapis is still lapis, the same rock with the blue helped along, and it sits at the budget end of the range. It is labelled where known.

Denim lapis

Denim lapis is the trade name for lighter lapis in which calcite is mixed finely through the lazurite, so the blue lightens to a washed jean color with the same gold pyrite. It is real lapis, untreated, and a grade of its own rather than a lesser version of the deep blue: the casual register of the stone, quieter in a mixed strand. A matte finish takes it further that way.

How the grades run

The top grades are an even, saturated royal blue with little white calcite and fine pyrite scattered through it. As calcite rises the blue lightens toward denim; as sodalite rises it turns gray; as pyrite rises it dulls. Beads that are all blue with no white or gray are mostly lazurite. Beads that show calcite, sodalite and pyrite together carry more of the mix and sit lower. Gray-toned beads are sodalite-heavy and sit at the low end.

There is no laboratory grade for lapis; GIA evaluates the stone but does not grade it. The A, AA and AAA in a bead title are trade grades, and at Dakota Stones they are set on the evenness of the blue: AAA is the even deep blue with the least calcite, and A shows more of the matrix.

Types of lapis lazuli beads

One name covers a range. The lapis on a bead table falls into five kinds, and each has its place.

Across the kinds, rounds carry the range from 2mm to 12mm, smooth, faceted, microfaceted and matte, with 8mm as the mala and bracelet size and guru beads to match, and large-hole rounds and rondelles on 8-inch strands. Faceting sharpens the blue under light, a smooth polish shows the matrix, and matte softens both. Lapis pairs with carnelian, turquoise, amazonite and aquamarine, and with gold-tone metal, which picks up the pyrite. See the denim lapis beads.

From rough to bead

Lapis is graded before it is cut. Rough comes out of the ground as blocks in which bands of blue lazurite run through white calcite and brown host rock, as in the stack above, and the sorting happens at this stage. The deep, even blue is set aside for the top grades, the calcite-veined material becomes the lighter strands and the irregular cuts, and the calcite-heavy material is what gets dyed. The blue in a finished bead has been cut from around everything else in a block like these, so the grade of a strand is settled at the rough, before a bead exists.

The lapis collection carries every kind above: graded and natural rounds, denim, nuggets and chips, and the dyed strands labelled as such, from 2mm accents to 12mm statement rounds and the cabochons and pendants beyond them.

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