I wanna talk about lemon chrysoprase 💛
This is another case where the stone trade as a whole just confuses me. Lemon/Citron chrysoprase is also- and more accurately- called lemon magnesite. Because it is... magnesite that is. Deposits of this mineral are often found in similar conditions as actual chrysoprase. Sometimes they’re even in the same nodule where one grows on top of the other. Sometimes you’ll get cut stones with a little bit of both. You can see where the name comes from. It’s confusing and annoying but it’s hardly the first time a stone was given a confusing name 🙄 and side by side they really couldn’t be confused for one another.
Despite all that, this really is one of my most favourite stones. I love the colour variations: more yellow to more green- very colourful to very pale- perfectly uniform to heavily included. It’s one of those colours that looks like it should be created in a lab rather than by nature. It’s both incredibly colourful and somehow subtle in jewellery. I’m not saying I could pull it off as a shirt, but as a ring or string of beads even my pale face can rock it 👻
