When in the early 1980s researchers at the Gemological Institute of America (GIA) unveiled a system to classify the breeds of red garnet—pyrope, almandine and spessartite—gem markets greeted the news with cheers.
Bronx cheers.
Why, dealers wondered, make all that fuss over stones that rarely cost more than $10 per carat—regardless of type. “I can’t take R.I. [refractive index] readings on all the red garnets, in my inventory,” says Dick Greenwood, A.F. Greenwood Inc., New York, “so I take a wild guess and send them out as whatever they seem to be.”
Maybe GIA’s painstaking garnet research would have been more appreciated if undertaken 140 years earlier—before low-priced dark-red garnets from Bohemia surged to flood the market in the mid-19th century. That deluge cost the species nearly six millenia of esteem it had enjoyed ever since Moses, circa 3,500 B.C., selected a red garnet, probably from India, as one of the dozen gems to be used in the high priest of Israel’s breastplate. Once red garnets became as common as well, agates, dealers seemed to lose all respect for them.
Indeed, today the term “garnet” is frequently a dealer synonym for ugliness of color in any red gem, especially ruby. It is common to hear gem dealers convey scorn or worse for stones by describing them as “garnet-colored” or “garnet-like.” That usually means the stone is either over-dark or over-purple. Just recently, for instance, when Sotheby’s failed to sell a very purplish 48-carat Burma ruby it badhood as “The Mandalay,” one ruby maven summed up prevailing contempt to the press as follows: “Why, the stone looks like a damned garnet.”
Given such lack of respect for red garnet, it is hardly surprising that pyrope and almandine, throughout history the birthstones for January, very often find themselves shunned in favor of others of the breed. Ironically, the prime pyrope substitute is rhodolite, a violet garnet discovered in the late 19th-century that few in the trade realize is a member of the pyrope-almandine family. Isn’t it time therefore that some one put in a good word for much-maligned red garnets?
From Regard to Disregard
The ancients had only good words for what is now considered the pyrope-almandine series of garnets, once as rare and as prized as ruby. Red garnet rated high praise from earliest times because it was strongly associated with the element of fire. In fact, the Greeks dubbed red garnet pyrope (meaning literally ” I see fire”), then bunched it together with other minerals under the general heading of anthrax (as in anthracite) because, as John Rouse writes in his book, “Garnet,” it “appeared to be burning from within when held up to the sun, like a burning coal.”
The connection with fire remained strong with the Romans, too. It was they who coined the name “carbuncle” (meaning “fiery gem”) by which red garnet was known until very recently. But long before the Romans adopted the name “carbuncle,” sages in India—where pyrope and almandine were and still are found in abundance—identified red garnets with the sun, the chief astrological influence on people’s lives.
Why does pyrope fail to kindle respect today? Rouse answers that question best: “The modern understanding and appreciation of garnet gems is suffering an all-time low, due to massive saturation of inexpensive Victorian-type jewelry that flooded the marketplace from the mid-1850s until the early 1900s in both America and England. Fueled by a new wealth among the upper industrial class of worker in both countries and a new consumer awareness of fine material goods, the movement spread rapidly.”
In short, pyrope’s reputation nosedived because it became a standby in low-priced mass-manufactured jewelry. Nearly a century after pyrope became, in effect, the poor man’s ruby, it is remembered, in Rouse’s words, as “an unattractive, very dark red stone found in … grandmother’s rings.” But look at a sampling of pyrope-almandine garnets and you should quickly be convinced that this gem is a victim of narrow-mindedness.
Seeing Red
Although the garden variety red garnet is often afflicted with heavy secondaries of brown or purple, there are those specimens that do just what the ancients said they did: glow like hot embers. Many of these burning-red stones come from southern and eastern Africa where a good many garnets are blessed with the same coloring agent, chromium, that is responsible for the best red in ruby.
To distinguish these African stones from their much more abundant iron-colored Indian and Thai counterparts, dealers call them chrome pyropes, says Abe Suleman, Tuckman International, Seattle. True chrome pyropes are currently the most expensive red garnets, costing as much as $15 per carat in 8mm x 6mm sizes. Most other varieties rarely fetch as much as $10 per carat, and frequently less than $5 per carat.
Although fine chrome pyrope has many admirers, connoisseurs reserve their highest praise for Arizona material known in the trade as “ant hill” garnet and found only on the San Carlos Indian reservation, well known as the world’s most important source of peridot. Like most decent pyrope, this type is exceedingly hard to find in finished sizes above 2 carats. Yet it still inspires fierce affection because of its pure blood-red color. “If you ask me, the only garnet found today that truly deserves to be called ‘pyrope’ is the ‘ant hill’ stuff,” says New York gem dealer Steve Stieglitz.
Gemologists who tend to identify gems by absorption spectra, refractive indices and chemical analysis would no doubt disagree with dealers who feel as Stieglitz does. They’ll tell you that garnet chemistry is so tricky that one dare not make judgment calls as to species by color alone. In fact, there are so many chemical combinations possible for red garnets that experts have proposed group names such as “pyrope-almandine” and, even more elaborately, “pyralspite” (a contraction of pyrope, almandine and spessartite).
But owing to the limited value of most red garnets, dealers don’t bother trying to make exacting gemological differentiations between various types. Instead, the trade goes by sight alone. Blood-red to slightly brownish-red garnets are called “pyropes,” violet-red to dark brownish-red ones “almandine” (after Alabanda, an ancient cutting center in Asia Minor) and yellowish-to-orange-red stones “spessartite.” Of the three red garnet types, almandine is the oldest and most ample variety and spessartite the newest and rarest, unknown before the 19th century.
Please note: this profile was originally published in 1992 in Modern Jeweler’s ‘Gem Profiles/2: The Second 60’, written by David Federman with photographs by Tino Hammid.
The 5.72-carat red garnet shown in the header image is courtesy of House of Onyx, Greenville, Ky.
