Zirconium reaches back through its parent stone into the ancient world of gems. Zircon, in its yellow, orange and brown varieties, was known to antiquity as jacinth or hyacinth and as jargoon, prized as a gem and credited in medieval lapidaries with the power to promote sleep and ward off evil, and its Persian-derived name, meaning gold-coloured, records that lore. The element itself has no alchemical or mythological identity, being an eighteenth-century discovery, but its symbolic inheritance flows from the gemstone. The colourless synthetic cubic zirconia, a zirconium compound, is today a familiar diamond simulant, extending the stone's long association with brilliance into the present.
Natural zircon and the synthetic cubic zirconia are frequently confused by jewellery buyers, but they are chemically distinct: zircon is a natural zirconium silicate gemstone mined in Sri Lanka, Cambodia and elsewhere, prized in its own right for brilliance and fire, while cubic zirconia is a laboratory-grown zirconium oxide manufactured specifically since the 1970s as an inexpensive diamond substitute. Some of the finest historic zircon gems, particularly colourless stones from Sri Lanka traded as Matara diamond, have at times been passed to unwary buyers as the real thing, while the familiar blue zircon is a twentieth century heat treatment and was never the imitation, so the same word-family confusion runs both backward into medieval gem lore and forward into the modern jewellery trade.