Tiger's Eye, Golden, Heated, Fancy Faceted Cube Beads, One 6mm Strand

Tiger's Eye is a variety of quartz which 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

These beads are cut, drilled and polished in China.

Heating is a very common form of enhancement and is used to affect desired alterations of color and/or clarity.  Heating can also be used to lighten or darken a stone.  Heat is one of the conditions that cause gems to form, whether in the ground or in a lab.  Heating occurs during natural gem formation.  But heating applied to the stone after gem formation is an enhancement.