Tiger Eye, Natural, Faceted Twisted Rice Beads, One 8mm Strand

Tiger Eye, Quartz, Natural, Faceted Twisted Rice Beads, One 8mm Strand

This price is for one strand 15 to 16 inches long. 

8mm twisted rice bead strands about 35 pieces.

Tiger's Eye is a variety of quartz. Quartz is a hard, crystalline mineral composed of silicon and oxygen atoms and is the second most abundant mineral in Earth's continental crust, behind feldspar.  Tiger’s Eye which exhibits a fascinating and constantly shifting light effect with the slightest change in position of the light or of the stone. It is a chatoyant gemstone that is usually a metamorphic rock with a golden to red-brown color and a silky luster. Chatoyancy is from the French word for "cat's eye".

These semiprecious beads come in your choice of their natural, unenhanced brown-gold state, or in heat-treated colors like blue or red.  Heating Tiger’s Eye is common to enhance colors. It can be found in Australia, Burma, India, Namibia, South Africa, the United States, Brazil, Canada, China, Korea, and Spain.

Can you believe this little piece of quartz used to be worth half an ounce of gold per carat in the 1870s? Now you can get it for a song, because there are abundant quantities of it especially in South Africa.

Hardness 7

This is a natural stone with no treatment other than cutting, drilling, and polishing in China.