elements
Silver
Ag
- Also known as
- argentumnative silver
- Crystal system
- cubic
- Hardness
- 2.5–3 on the Mohs scale
- Lustre
- metallic
- Colour
- Metallic white, tarnishing black
- Where it forms
- In hydrothermal veins, often with galena, and as wire-like native masses in the oxidised zones of such deposits.
- Chiefly from
- Kongsberg, NorwayPotosi, BoliviaMexicoOntario, Canada
Why it is that colour
Reflects essentially all visible wavelengths, which is why it is the most reflective metal there is. The black tarnish is silver sulfide, formed by reaction with traces of sulfur compounds in air.
Safety
Metallic silver is largely inert. Colloidal silver taken internally is a different matter: it does not treat any condition for which it is marketed, and prolonged use causes argyria, an irreversible blue-grey discoloration of the skin. Regulators in several countries have taken enforcement action over colloidal silver health claims.
Where it comes from
Mostly a by-product of lead, zinc and copper mining rather than mined for itself. Mexico and Peru lead production. Potosi in Bolivia, worked from 1545 under the Spanish mita system of forced labour, killed an unknown but enormous number of Indigenous and enslaved African workers.
Historical use
Monetary metal for most of recorded history, and the basis of photography before digital. Silver halides darken on exposure to light, which is the entire chemistry of the photographic negative, and the collapse of film photography removed a very large share of industrial silver demand within a decade.
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
The moon in the alchemical scheme, paired with gold as sun, and associated with the feminine, with reflection and with intuition across many traditions. Its folkloric role against werewolves and vampires is much later and largely nineteenth-century literary. Its genuine antimicrobial property was known empirically long before it was understood.
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.
Worth knowing
Silver's antimicrobial property is real and was used long before germ theory. Water and wine were stored in silver vessels because they kept better; silver leaf was applied to wounds. The mechanism — silver ions disrupting bacterial enzymes and membranes — is now well understood, and silver dressings are used in modern burn care.
That genuine property is the seed of the colloidal silver industry, and the leap from it is instructive. A silver dressing on a wound puts ions where the bacteria are. Drinking a silver suspension does not, and what it does do is deposit silver in the skin, where light reduces it to metal and turns the person permanently blue-grey. Argyria does not fade.
Potosi is worth naming. The Cerro Rico produced perhaps half the world's silver for a century, and it did so through the mita, a system of rotational forced labour. Estimates of the death toll vary widely and all of them are very large.
Identity checked against IMA-CNMNC master list, June 2025.