Garnet Beads

Frequently asked questions

• Is garnet always red?

  No. Garnet is a family of related minerals and covers nearly every color. Almandine and pyrope are the deep reds of most bead strands, and rhodolite is raspberry to violet-red. Spessartine is orange, hessonite is cinnamon-orange, and the grossular group runs from clear green tsavorite to the opaque green hydrogrossular sold as African jade. Purple garnet, a pyrope-almandine from Mozambique, is the newest color in beads. A strand sold simply as garnet is almost always red almandine.
• Is garnet treated?

  Almost never. Garnet is one of the few colored stones that reaches the market untreated — no heat, no oil, no dye, no filling at trade scale — so the color in a strand is the color the rough came out of the ground with, and it does not fade or rub off. The exceptions are lab-grown or composite material and dyed look-alikes sold under the name, and coated or plated strands, which carry the treatment in their title. Natural garnet is recorded as natural; anything else is labelled where known.
• What is the difference between rhodolite, almandine and pyrope garnet?

  All three are red garnets, told apart by chemistry and tone. Almandine is iron-rich, deep wine to burgundy with a brownish undertone at times — the bead-trade default, and what most red garnet strands are. Pyrope is magnesium-rich, a cleaner clear red without the brown, historically the Bohemian garnet of Victorian jewelry. Rhodolite is a pyrope-almandine blend, raspberry to violet-red, lighter and more transparent than either; in beads it is usually sold as red garnet rather than by name.
• How can real garnet beads be told from glass?

  Weight, hardness and what is inside. Garnet is dense — noticeably heavy for its size, where glass feels light. At Mohs 6.5–7.5 it scratches glass and shrugs off a steel point. Under a loupe natural garnet shows fine needle or crystal inclusions and a slightly oily brightness from its high refractive index, while glass shows round bubbles and swirl marks. Drill holes on natural stone are clean of dye. Price is the last tell: faceted garnet is not a cheap stone, and strands far below market are glass or dyed quartz.
• What is hessonite garnet?

  Hessonite is the cinnamon-orange to honey-brown variety of grossular garnet, most of it from Sri Lanka and India, and one of the two orange garnets in beads; the other is spessartine, whose brightest orange is sold as mandarin garnet. The bead trade sells both as orange garnet, and on a strand they are hard to tell apart — hessonite leans brown-orange with a swirled, treacly look under a loupe, spessartine toward a clearer, brighter orange. Hessonite has come as smooth and faceted rounds from 4mm to 14mm, rondelles, coins, ovals, rectangles and faceted nuggets, on 16-inch and 8-inch strands.