Spessartite, the Mandarin Garnet

Spessartite, or spessartine, is the manganese aluminium member of the garnet group, and in its purest form it is a vivid orange; the most saturated pure-orange stones are marketed as mandarin garnet. Most natural spessartite lies somewhere between orange and red because it forms a chemical series with almandine, the iron garnet, and the iron pulls the colour toward brownish-red. The name comes from the Spessart district of Bavaria where it was first described.

Fine gem material was scarce until deposits in Namibia and later Nigeria and Mozambique reached the market in the 1990s, so bright spessartite as a jewellery stone is largely a recent arrival despite the mineral being long known. Like garnet generally it is singly refractive and durable, hardness 6.5 to 7.5. It carries no distinct traditional symbolism of its own; its associations in modern practice are the general garnet themes of energy and vitality, colour-inflected toward the solar and sacral.