White Beryl, Goshenite

Goshenite is the colourless variety of beryl, the beryllium aluminium silicate species that also gives emerald, aquamarine and morganite; it is essentially beryl with none of the trace elements that colour its cousins. The name comes from Goshen, Massachusetts, a locality where it was found. Being hard, around 7.5 to 8, and often very clean, colourless beryl has historically been used as a diamond or white-gem substitute and, according to some accounts, was cut for early spectacle and magnifying lenses, the German Brille, spectacles, derives ultimately from beryllus. It is the least commercially important of the beryls precisely because it lacks colour, the property collectors and jewellers prize in the family. It has no independent traditional symbolism; where it appears in modern crystal practice the properties assigned to it are the general clarity themes given to colourless stones, a recent and colour-led attribution rather than an inherited one.