This is a GORGEOUS piece of turquoise. You may not understand why because there’s a piece of brown rock in it. But you’d first have to understand how and why this is done. It’s accepted that you can appreciate it aesthetically, but why turquoise junkies love their turquoise with host rock in it? I’ll tell you why.

Human beings have loved turquoise for as long as we can remember. In fact, it’s one of the first gemstones used in jewelry. Another little known fact is that it’s more rare than diamonds, but that’s another discussion. We’ve used turquoise for a very long time. Humans have attached all sorts of significance to the stone. In some cases it was described as being part of the sky. In other instances it was given healing powers. But modern turquoise as we know it came via the French love for the stone that they traded with the Turks. The Turks traded the stone from Persia and came to be known as Turquoise (Turkish Stone) in French and subsequently English. Folks in the Americas knew of the stone and mined it themselves. It was used for religious as well as decorative purposes.

Fast forward to about 100 years ago and you’ll find that turquoise jewelry became extremely popular during the gilded age. Because of this demand, jewelers such as Tiffany and Co. purchased turquoise from the American Southwest. In addition to this, Native Americans began producing more consumer jewelry with Southwestern motifs and imagery from their culture. I’m moving very fast here, so hang on. The next paragraph is the one that matters.

So, you have all of this turquoise -- much of it prized for not having any “rock like” appearance. Essentially, the more clear the more interesting. Then the great depression happened. This lead to less turquoise mining, which in turn lead to folks using other substances (glass, plastics, etc) as substitutes. Now, the Native Americans in the Southwest didn’t mind stones with host rock or inclusions. It was the East Coast jewelers that cared about that. But out of this developed a new aesthetic where Native jewelry had more “natural” look as it often had host stone (as much American turquoise almost always did) than the stuff sold back east. Fast forward a bit and the turquoise shortage during the depression and WWII ended. What does this mean? It means that people don’t necessarily want the stuff with colored glass, beads, or plastic as much as they want the real deal (to them). How do you show that it’s “real” turquoise? Well, it’s difficult to do if the turquoise has a bunch of features you can only find in natural rocks. So, tadaaa! People come to appreciate turquoise with host matrix a lot more than “pure blue” or “pure green” stones.

Now, this is a narrativized version of the story -- shortened for consumption on a website. There’s a bunch of nuance that’s missing. One, for example, is that some Native folks didn’t concern themselves with the chemical composition of turquoise as much as the rest of us did. Most important to many of them was the color. So the idea that there’s some purity test for turquoise really came about during the Native American jewelry boom of the ‘70s. There’s nuance in there also. Some did care about the stone itself for medicinal and ritual purposes. Your head will spin with the amount of nuance, so I’ll spare you. Basically: People like it and appreciate it more because it’s difficult to fake. It’s like asking why people like wax LP recordings over digital music. Or why we like 1 take songs over multi-track recordings. Sometimes we appreciate the “human” or “natural” qualities of a thing in an aesthetic sense. Which is why purely talking about balance may not inform us about aesthetic pleasure.

Whew! That was a lot. But do you get why a rock in the middle of a stone with “puddles” is pretty? The blue colors moving around the host stone? The guarantee that it’s natural because there’s some stone in there? The aesthetic pleasure of imbalance surrounded by balance? Now you get it. I could’ve just said “It’s natural” but it would’ve been less true than my narrativized version of turquoise aesthetic appreciation. But in reality, that simple statement suffices if you understand some of the background or you’re immersed in turquoise culture. The natural look of the stone is appealing.

.Should you get it? I’d say yes. It’s a versatile piece and now you either know more about pieces like this or you already did and it’s in your cart. Because if you understood it before I said it, you know: “This is a GORGEOUS piece of turquoise”.