Iolite 5X7mm Faceted Pear(Calibrated)

Turn it and the blue comes and goes.

Iolite on a strand looks like denim washed a few times, blue with gray in it. Turn the strand and the color shifts: one face inky violet-blue, the next pale and watery, the third a hint of straw. That flicker belongs to the stone, not to the light. Glass can be blue, but glass cannot do that. Makers reach for iolite when they want a sapphire look at a working price, on a bead that holds its color across a whole necklace.

Legend gives iolite a job at sea. Viking navigators are said to have used thin slices of it as a filter, cutting glare and locating the sun through overcast sky so they could fix their own position. Whether that ever happened is unsettled, and the tale is passed along as tradition rather than record, but the name Viking compass stone has stayed with it. The nickname holds the idea in it: light read through a blue stone, direction found on a day with no sun in view. Iolite has long been fashioned for adornment, and in the language of anniversaries it belongs to the twenty-first year.

Beliefs about stones are tradition, not advice. Read the full story.