amorphous
Goldstone
- Also known as
- aventurine glassmonkstonestellaria
- Crystal system
- amorphous
- Hardness
- 5–6 on the Mohs scale
- Lustre
- vitreous
- Colour
- Deep brown-red with dense gold sparkle; also blue and green
- Where it forms
- Made in a furnace. It has never been in the ground.
- Chiefly from
- Venice, Italy, historically; China and India today
Why it is that colour
Metallic copper crystals suspended in glass. The melt is loaded with copper oxide and cooled under reducing conditions so that the copper comes out of solution as tiny reflective platelets. Blue and green goldstone use cobalt and manganese glass respectively.
Safety
Safe to handle. It is glass and sharp if broken.
Where it comes from
Manufactured, chiefly in China and India. Very cheap.
Historical use
One of the more romantic manufacturing histories in glassmaking, and the origin of the name aventurine — the mineral was named after the glass, which was reportedly named for the accident that produced it.
Recorded as history and attributed where possible. That a stone was used for something establishes that people used it, not that it worked.
What is attributed to it, and since when
Goldstone is a manufactured material with a genuine and interesting history — developed in seventeenth-century Venice, reportedly by the Miotti family, who held the secret for generations. It has no traditional metaphysical attribution because it is a product. Meanings attached to it in the crystal trade are modern and are sometimes accompanied by a claim that it is a natural stone.
Described, not endorsed. Dating a claim is not the same as assessing it — but an association that first appears in a book published in 1985 is not an ancient inheritance, whatever the label says. A sincere account of feeling better is compatible with the stone doing nothing — see the placebo effect.
Sold as this, but not
Worth knowing
Goldstone is in this collection deliberately, and it is not here to be sneered at. It is a genuinely beautiful material with a four-hundred-year history, made by a Venetian family who guarded the process, and the physics of it — copper precipitating out of a glass melt as microscopic reflective plates — is a real piece of craft chemistry.
It is here because it is routinely sold in wellbeing shops alongside natural stones, in the same bowls, at the same prices, with a card describing its properties, and nothing indicates that it came out of a furnace in the last few months rather than out of the earth.
The honest position is the one bismuth occupies: manufactured, disclosed, valued for what it is.
Identity checked against IMA-CNMNC master list, June 2025.