The Halcraft Collection Natural Turquoise Beads are a wonderful, high quality addition to our line of beautiful semi-precious stone beads. Turquoise is a generally chalky and light stone that is most often found in areas of high copper concentration. The combination of oxidizing copper, running water, and chalky, light colored stone, creates a natural dying process that can go on for millennia. The result is a beautiful blue-green stone with inclusions of harder brown stone in random matrix, making every bead and stone from any deposit completely original.
The beauty and natural elegance of the aqua color of Natural Turquoise beads have been used in jewelry as far back as Egypt, the Aztecs, and Natives of the Americas as well. The stone is easy to work because it is so soft, but it is also fragile as a result. It is for this reason that all modern turquoise jewelry is hardened with a clear resin that fills in all of the pores and crevasses in the stone before it is cut, which is called "stabilized" stone. The resin dries nearly as hard as stone itself, but it is perfectly clear (or in some cases, dyed to match the aqua turquoise color to add color to the stone as well as strength), and this makes the stone less fragile and enables it to be worked into smaller and more detailed shapes and still last for generations of use.
