Spessartine Garnet on Microcline

Item Description

The Wushan Mine is one of the great Chinese localities, producing amazingly attractive and highly displayable pieces of Spessartine Garnet. These beautiful and iconic specimens are some of the most easily recognizable specimens to come out of China in the last 20+ years. These will go down as Chinese classics. This is a good quality small cabinet sized specimen which features dozens of sharp, very gemmy, lustrous, strong orange color crystals of Spessartine Garnet measuring up to 5 mm which are associated with soft silvery-green colored crystal groups of Muscovite sitting on cream colored Microcline matrix. The Garnets show predominantly trapezohedral faces. The piece is in excellent condition, with minimal damage. I love the fact that the Garnets are brilliant, sharp and smooth - no pitting or dull faces anywhere. Garnet is a well known mineral, but you have to keep in mind that it's quite rare to find good matrix specimens of Spessartine from any locality in the world. This material is becoming less and less available on the market, and keep in mind that there are only a few worldwide localities that produce this color of Spessartine in fine specimens. Gem orange Spessartine specimens are NOT easy to find these days from any locality.