Jewelry Lovers

Pure chance is often the best ally for discovering the secrets of Mother Earth. She surely still holds many surprises in store. Though relevant preliminary studies did effect positive results in this case, it was nevertheless a happy accident for the Finnish mineralogist Laitakari when, during the Russian-Finnish winter campaign of 1939/40 while inspecting fortification emplacements along the border, he climbed up on some granite boulders whose feldspar components exhibited the unmistakable schiller of labradorite. He had thus discovered the Finnish source of a mineral which, until then, had been almost exclusively confined to the Labrador coast of Canada.

And not only that, for the new ornamental stone—a variety of labradorite, which is a lime-rich feldspar forming an isomorphous and crystallizing in the triclinic system—immeasurably surpasses the hitherto known green- or blue-iridescent specimens in its gorgeous shimmer. Both developed in the liquid-magmatic phase as a primary component of granites. At an appropriate angle to the incident light, manifold intensely dazzling colors suddenly flash out from the dark smoke to ash gray body color: wonderful spectrum colors from blue and green to yellow and orange, through to glowing red, whence the stone has been honored with the name spectrolite.

The typical color schiller of labradorite, whose “labradorescence” resembles the iridescent wings of tropical butterflies culminating in the even more complete rainbow colors of spectrolite, changes with the incidence of light. This is caused by the combination of interference and diffraction of light by a microscopically fine grating of the most minute, parallel magnetite needles enclosed in the stone in rigidly controlled alignment and dense succession. Blocks weighing about a ton each are sawn out of the country rock, the granite matrix of the spectrolite, in the neighborhood of Ylijarvi village in Yldmaa parish.

As in diamond production, by far the larger part finds industrial application; for in the color-conscious Scandinavian lands the glittering granitic rock, cut into slabs, is in high favor for covering facades and lining walls. The vividly colored fragments used in jewelry are relatively small, but are attractive in their rainbow schiller shown off by flat or curved bands. Because of the small size, it is rarely made into ash trays or figures, but in pendants and cuff links for young people, the shimmering gleam of this captive rainbow is set ablaze by the incident light which alone, as with many other gem or ornamental stones, has the power to awaken its beauty to life.

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Labradorite and Spectrolite: Vibrant Rainbows