A stone took millions of years to form somewhere, and a few months to reach you. Here is what we know about that journey, region by region.
We could have written that our stones are “ethical” and moved on. That is what most brands do, and it is very easy to write.
We would rather give you what you need to judge for yourself: where these stones actually form, which regions they are mined in, and what we always tell you about the treatments they have been through.
Tap a dot to jump to that region.
Amethysts grow inside geodes in basalt flows: gas bubbles trapped in cooling lava, later lined with violet quartz by very cold groundwater — millions of years after the volcano went quiet.
The same basalt plateau as southern Brazil, just across the border. Agates form concentric bands there, each band recording a change in the fluid that laid it down.
Rhodochrosite from Capillitas builds up as banded pink stalactites in hydrothermal veins. Chilean lapis is paler and more veined with white than Afghan lapis: we own that difference rather than dyeing it away.
Obsidian is not a mineral, it is a glass. Silica-rich lava cooled too fast for anything to crystallise — which is why it breaks with that smooth, razor-sharp edge.
Olivine from the Earth's mantle, carried up as fragments in basalt lava. Mining there is reserved for members of the San Carlos Apache tribe, on their own land, entirely by hand.
Nephrite is a microscopic felt of interlocking fibres. It is that tangle — not its hardness — that makes it almost impossible to break.
Aventurine is not a mineral but a rock: a quartzite whose glittering green comes from inclusions of fuchsite, a mica coloured by chromium.
In moonstone, two feldspars separated into alternating layers during a very slow cooling. Those layers scatter light — that is where the drifting blue sheen comes from.
In the pegmatite pockets of the Karakoram, the last fluids of a cooling granite, loaded with beryllium, let beryl crystals grow to a rare clarity.
Turquoise only forms in arid climates, where copper-rich water percolates slowly through rocks containing phosphorus and aluminium, and precipitates in the fractures.
Vesicular basalt: the cavities are magma gases, frozen in place as it rose. Basalt makes up more than 90% of the planet's volcanic rock — we don't invent a famous volcano for it.
The island exposes some of the richest pegmatite fields in the world. A large share of the rose quartz and amazonite on the market comes from here — most often from small artisanal workings.
Quartz replaced a fibrous mineral there, fibre by fibre, inside iron formations two billion years old — keeping the original alignment. Hence the sheen that moves with the light.
A darker amethyst, often edged with red, grown in quartz veins rather than geodes. Mining there is largely artisanal.
A stone is rarely cut where it is mined. The vast majority of the world's beads are shaped in India and China, whatever the origin of the rough.
That is why we speak of a mining region, never of “a stone from India”: the two do not mean the same thing, and blurring them suits too many people.
A basalt flow cools, trapping bubbles of gas. Over millions of years, silica-rich groundwater seeps in drop by drop and lays down layer after layer of quartz. A geode is simply a bubble that filled very slowly.
As a granite crystallises, the rare elements — beryllium, lithium, boron — stay behind in the leftover liquid. That liquid, very fluid, lets a few enormous, clear crystals grow in pockets. This is what we call a pegmatite.
Buried, heated and compressed, rocks recompose while still solid. Nothing melts: the atoms rearrange. This is how the toughest stones are born — jade owes its strength to this felt of fibres formed under strain.
“We don't sell rare stones.
We sell stones we are willing to talk about.”
A large share of the stones on the market are heated, dyed or stabilised. These treatments are not cheating: some have been practised since antiquity, others are essential to the stone's durability. The problem starts when nobody mentions them.
Natural citrine is rare. The overwhelming majority of citrine on the market is heated amethyst — a stable, permanent treatment, and undetectable without a laboratory. We write it down rather than let you believe otherwise.
A natural agate is grey, white, beige, brown or russet. A turquoise blue, a candy pink, a strong even purple: that is dye. Dyeing agates is an old and common practice, not a flaw — as long as it is stated.
Turquoise is a porous stone. The vast majority of what circulates is stabilised, meaning impregnated so it lasts. Without that stabilisation it cracks and shifts colour. So we say stabilised turquoise.
The gold and brown are natural. Any red tiger's eye has been heated; bright blues, greens and purples are dyed. Natural hawk's eye is a muted blue-grey, never vivid.
Natural howlite is white with grey veining. All blue howlite is dyed howlite — a very convincing imitation of turquoise. We will never sell it under any name but its own.
Every creation is handmade by our team of artisans, around a natural stone chosen for its intention.
