Your Jewelry Box stone of the month is Malachite.

Malachite is a beautiful green stone with irregular black banding. The colors in its bands range from a very light to deep green. It shows beautiful in earrings, necklaces, and pendants. Imitation malachite has white and/or black banding very irregular banding. Malachite also combines with other minerals with wonderful results.

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Malachite is a semi-precious stone and also a valuable copper ore. Because of its distinctive bright green color and its presence in the nearly all copper deposits, it serves as a prospecting guide for that metal. Malachite has been used as an ornamental stone and as a gemstone. It is responsible for the green color of tarnished copper and bronze. Malachite derives its name from Greek meaning soft stone. Malachite was used as a mineral pigment in green paints from antiquity until about 1800 when it was replaced by synthetic greens. Even before the first Egyptian dynasty (4500 B.C.), it was used as green eye-paint. In the New Stone Age came the discovery of extracting certain metals from the ores in which they occur. Probably the first such material to be used malachite was easily reduced to copper in a strong fire. This may have led to the search for other metallic ores in the development of metallurgy.
Care and treatment: Malachite should be cleaned with a soft cloth that does not contain chemicals. If the stone is set in silver, a chemically treated cloth may be used on the metal. Malachite is the anniversary gemstone for the 13th year of marriage.Zaire is the primary source of malachite with notable occurrences in the Urals, Siberia, France, South Australia, Namibia and USA (Arizona).
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