Seraphinite - The Angel Stone

_{Image above: A piece of seraphinite. Source: Bob Richmond on Flickr, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic.}

The videos below will allow you to learn more about seraphinite's unique properties, as well as see the stone up close in all of its mysterious beauty.

Like other highly desirable semiprecious stones, seraphinite is unfortunately faked a lot of time by unscrupulous jewelry sellers and retailers. This is becoming increasingly problematic on eBay (I've tried to filter listings I've featured on this page as best as possible but cannot guaranty all listings are real.)

I've seen plenty of fake stones listed for sale myself, often made from less expensive materials such as green or moss agate (which have some of the same light grey to dark green variations), dyed howlite, and green magnesite. Other sellers will "compress" chips and dust of "leftover" charoite together to make poor quality "stones" that are dull in color and lacking true vibrancy.

So, how can you know if you've got the real thing or not? Be sure to look for strong, sharp crystal patterns as you should see in real seraphinite, and the chatoyancy effect: fakes made from agate, howlite or magnesite will not exhibit this unique property!

The image here are some of the seraphinite beads for jewelry making in my collection: pieces I know are the real thing. The color is always a consist olive to dark green. If you see something described as seraphinite that is a strong "acid-y" green or even bright blue-green, without patterning as you see here, be extremely wary.

If you are a jewelry designer, Seraphinite can be a wonderful stone to work with. Seraphinite's dark green, olive colors work well when combined with numerous other semi-precious stones such as zebra stone, tree agate, many varieties of jasper, onyx, hematite, peridot, and of course Seraphinite's close purple "relative", charoite. It also looks lovely with freshwater pearls of various shapes, colors and sizes.

It is more common to see seraphinite combined with silver than with gold, to pick up the silvery/grey lights of the stone.

Of course you can also go for a strong contrast and use complementary colors to set off the seraphinite boldly. The image here is one of my favorite necklaces, featuring seraphinite set off with red garnet and yellow citrine faceted stones in sterling silver.

Here's a tip when looking for seraphinite beads on eBay: if the price per strand seems too low to be the real thing, it probably is. Genuine seraphinite is not a stone you're going to generally find for anywhere under $10/16" strand - at least not unless you're talking very low quality and tiny beads! Quite often the price is much more in the $20/16" and (way) up range for larger, better quality seraphinite round beads, discs and small shapes. Faceted cut and larger specimens can be much more expensive.

So just keep that in mind if you're trying to be sure to buy authentic stones and can't get to a gem show/bead store to examine materials in person.