Antique and Vintage Moonstone Jewelry

Unlike gemstones such as sapphires, moonstones are usually not artificially enhanced to goose their color and value. Moonstones come by their characteristics honestly. What you look for in a good moonstone is something called schiller, which is basically its lustre when polished. Schiller is the result of light bouncing off the stone’s thin layers of albite (producing blue hues) and thicker layers of orthoclase feldspar (the white, pearly, moon-like glow). To bring out the schiller in a piece of moonstone, the mineral is usually formed into a rounded cabochon, worn in a ring or pendant, in which the layers of the stone run parallel to the cabochon’s flat base. That said, moonstones with inclusions, or imperfections, inside the stone are also prized since they can produce dazzling cat’s-eye effects. Less frequently, moonstones are carved into cameos (their hardness of about a 6 on the Mohs scale makes this possible; by comparison, diamonds are at the top of the scale at 10). Because moonstones are hard enough to facet, they sometimes are cut into cushion shapes, but the stone is brittle, so cut moonstones are the exception rather than the rule.