Kingman Turquoise — The Heart of American Turquoise

If you've ever pictured turquoise, chances are you pictured Kingman. Mined from the Cerbat Mountains of northwestern Arizona, this is the stone that taught America what turquoise looks like — a clean, confident blue so definitive the industry simply named the color after it: Kingman Blue.

The ground here has been worked for more than a thousand years. Long before Arizona was a state, Native peoples were chasing turquoise veins through these hills, heating the rock with fire and cracking it open with water — and the stone hammers and charcoal they left behind are still being found. Commercial mining began in the 1880s, and Kingman has been running, in one form or another, ever since.

Kingman's signature is its range. It gives up sky-blues and deep ocean-blues colored by the copper in the desert rock, threaded with matrix in every shade from soft brown to true black, often sparkling with flecks of pyrite. It's famous for its webbing — the prized "water web" and spiderweb patterns — and for something few mines can produce at all: solid, rounded nuggets. No two stones read the same.