Jewellery 101
Citrines don’t have the cachet of some more precious stones. But don’t let that stop you from enjoying their sunny hues.
Question: What’s lemon yellow or red-orange and sparkles all over? Answer: Citrine. But you wouldn’t be wrong if you said topaz, yellow sapphire, golden beryl or grossular garnet—all gemstones that look like citrine. The citrine may be a little less precious than a sapphire or a topaz, but it is glimmering and lustrous and full of sunny vibes. It is the happy stone—and a rumoured antidote to poison to boot. Ancients believed that the citrine could magically rid the body of toxins, and it was a popular talisman against snakebite.
Despite its optimistic aura and healing powers, the citrine is not the most well known of gems. It doesn’t have the instant cachet of an emerald or a ruby, but its cheeriness and ’70s tinted chromatics are exactly what we want this winter. And the citrine is slowly coming into celebrityhood: Angelina Jolie gave a pendant necklace to the Smithsonian’s National Gem Collection in 2015 featuring 64 cushion-cut citrines and a massive 177-carat pear-shaped citrine.
A RARE QUARTZ
The citrine is an iron-tinted quartz with a colour range that goes from lemon to marmalade. Naturally occurring citrines are actually quite rare and happen only when amethysts are formed near heat sources in the earth’s crust. Brazil has big deposits of citrine at Rio Grande do Sul, but it can also be found in Madagascar, the United States and Spain. But here’s the thing about citrines: The majority of these commercial gemstones are actually purple amethysts that have been heat-treated to obtain a yellowy-orange, even reddish, hue. If you heat an amethyst, you get a bright-lemon colour, while a synthetic citrine, created through a hydrothermal process, is intensely coloured. The only type of citrine you shouldn’t buy is one that’s fully brownish in colour.
WHICH ONES ARE THE MOST VALUABLE?
A cool kind of lesser-known citrine is half purple and half yellow. It’s called an ametrine or a bolivianite and is, as you might have guessed, a hybrid citrine-amethyst stone that comes from Bolivia—the Anahí mine in Santa Cruz, to be precise. The mine’s location was lost for centuries and rediscovered in the 1960s, but ametrines have only become popular over the past 10 years. Salma Hayek and Empress Emerita Michiko of Japan, for instance, reportedly are fans. The ametrine’s duo chromatics come from differences in temperature and pressure during formation, leading to differences in iron oxidation.
THE BEST CUTS TO BUY
The Anahí mine is now the only substantial source of gem-quality ametrines in the world; the deposit is not limitless, so ametrines are potentially a good and affordable investment. Their double colour is often showcased with classic rectangle emerald cuts that are half amethyst and half citrine. But the balanced approach can be a little ho-hum for such a strange gemstone. Instead, look for creative cuts that play with the orientation of the colour zones or for fantasy and concave cuts that scatter light and colours.
A PRINCESS’S DYING GIFT
Ametrines were mined in Bolivia for centuries, and the duo-coloured gems made their way to Spain. There are a few legends floating around about how ametrines made it to Europe, but a good one involves a beautiful princess of the Ayoreo tribe named Anahí. She became the object of affection of Spanish conquistador Don Felipe de Urriola y Goitia, who married Anahí with the idea of taking her back to Spain with him. But the Ayoreos got wind of Don Felipe’s cunning plan. They plotted to kill the Spaniard to stop him from taking their princess away. Anahí saved him and arranged for him to escape—which of course cost her her life. Before dying, she gave him an ametrine as a symbol of the divided love she felt for Don Felipe and her people.