Tiger Eye Pendulum Pendants

Description

What is Tiger Eye?

“Common name for a variety of quartz which is chatoyant because of subparallel intergrowth of quartz crystals and altered amphibole fibres that mostly turned into limonite. Much used as an ornamental and lapidary rock. See also Tiger Iron.

Crocidolite is a blue fibrous asbestiform sodic amphibole, which occurs in the iron formations of the Transvaal Supergroup in the Griqualand West region of the Northern Cape. Pseudocrocidolite is a chatoyant golden-yellow fibrous quartz with included subparallel altered crocidolite fibers, known popularly as tiger’s eye, commonly interpreted as m>quartz pseudomorphous after crocidolite. Both minerals were originally collected along the Orange River by German naturalist Martin Hinrich Lichtenstein (1780-1857) in 1803 [Lichtenstein, 1811-12], and first described scientifically by the German chemist Martin Heinrich Klaproth (1743-1817) in 1811 [Klaproth at pp. 72-74 and pp.75-76].

A new interpretation of the origin of tiger’s eye was recently given by Heaney and Fisher (2003): “Tiger’s-eye is an attractive and popular gemstone that is ubiquitous in stores that cater to rock and mineral collectors. For more than a century, textbooks and museum displays have identified the material as an archetype of pseudomorphism, i.e., the replacement of one mineral by another with the retention of the earlier mineral’s shape. Our study has revealed that the textures responsible for the shimmer of tiger’s-eye do not represent pseudomorphic substitution of quartz after preexisting crocidolite asbestos. Rather, we argue that tiger’s-eye classically exemplifies synchronous mineral growth through a crack-seal vein-filling process.”