Lapis lazuli

Rock Low Classical

Also known as

lapisultramarine

Crystal system

variable

Hardness

5–5.5 on the Mohs scale

Lustre

dull

Colour

Deep blue with white and gold flecks

Where it forms

In contact-metamorphosed limestone, where the original rock supplied the calcite and circulating fluids supplied everything else.

Chiefly from

Sar-e-Sang, AfghanistanOvalle, ChileLake Baikal, Russia

Why it is that colour

The blue is lazurite. The white is calcite and the gold flecks are pyrite, and their proportions vary from piece to piece — which is exactly what makes this a rock rather than a mineral.

Safety

Safe to handle. Much commercial lapis is dyed to hide pale calcite, and the dye will come off on a cloth with acetone.

Where it comes from

Afghan material from Badakhshan is the historic and finest source, and its trade has been documented as a conflict-financing route. Chilean material is paler and heavily calcite-flecked; Russian material is intermediate. Dyeing is very common at the cheap end.

Historical use

Ground lapis was ultramarine, the most expensive pigment in European painting — more costly than gold by weight, imported through Venice, and reserved by contract for the Virgin’s robe. That monopoly ended in 1826, when a French chemist won a prize for synthesising it, and the price fell by a factor of several hundred almost overnight.

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

As old as documented gem use gets. Traded from Afghanistan to Mesopotamia and Egypt from at least the fourth millennium BC, and named in the Epic of Gilgamesh. Its associations with the heavens, with royalty and with truth are genuinely ancient and continuous, and the medieval and modern readings largely extend rather than invent them.

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

dyed jasper sold as Swiss lapissodalitereconstituted lapis powder in resin

Worth knowing

Lapis is a rock, not a mineral, and it is the clearest case in the collection of why the distinction matters. Two pieces of lapis can differ substantially in composition — more lazurite here, more calcite there, pyrite or none — because a rock is a mixture and the proportions are an accident of where it formed. A mineral species has a formula. A rock has a recipe, loosely followed.

The ultramarine story is worth the space. For four hundred years the blue in European religious painting was ground Afghan rock carried four thousand miles, and its cost was so notorious that patrons specified in contracts how much of it a painter had to use. In 1824 the Société d'Encouragement pour l'Industrie Nationale offered six thousand francs for a synthetic equivalent. Jean-Baptiste Guimet claimed it in 1828. The most precious colour in the world became a commodity, and painters could finally use blue for the sky.

Identity checked against IMA-CNMNC master list, June 2025.