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I am starry-eyed over these crazy blue night sky stones. They are a material called Glacierite that I found at this year's Tucson Gem Show. Here’s what a lapidary artist shared with me about it:
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Blue Ice Glacierite is a newly discovered mineral from Indonesia that is in the Beta-Aluminate family of hard ceramics; the chemical composition of the material is a Sodium-Aluminum Oxide. It is very hard like all Aluminum oxides; For instance, Sapphire is also an Aluminum Oxide. Blue Ice Glacierite was formed as the unintended artifact of an industrial process or smelting, like many other materials used in the Mineral and Jewelry trade such as Zincite, Fordite, Swedish Blue glass and Leland Blue. This new discovery from Indonesia was found buried 2-3 meters beneath sand in an abandoned gold mine in Sumatra, likely aged at several decades, stemming from an extremely hot smelting process such as extracting gold from ore. The blue patches seen in the material are likely due to the high concentrations of copper inclusions present. Blue Ice Glacierite is non-toxic and is not radioactive, hard and not brittle, an interesting new addition to mineral market.
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I’ve decided to make the Glacierite into rings. I will be working on soldering the ring bands to the bezel cups today. The upcoming collection will have many rings... I hope I’ve got your size covered, but feel free to reply with your size (or any other requests you have) and I’ll take that into account if I can. It’s always helpful to hear your input!
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Here are how the rings and bezel cups look this very moment:
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