Pyrope Garnet

Pyrope Garnet has good toughness, making it suitable for daily wear. It lacks cleavage, which minimizes the risk of chipping and cracking, and possesses a sturdy internal structure.

Pyrope Garnet is generally durable and maintains its integrity under most conditions encountered during daily use, making it suitable for regular use.

In petrographic thin section, the most distinguishing features of pyrope are those shared with the other common garnets: high relief and isotropy. Garnets tend to be less strongly coloured than other silicate minerals in thin section, although pyrope may show a pale pinkish-purple hue in plane-polarized light. The lack of cleavage, commonly euhedral crystal morphology, and mineral associations should also be used in identification of pyrope under the microscope.

The origin of most pyrope is in ultramafic rocks, typically peridotite from the Earth's mantle: these mantle-derived peridotites can be attributed both to igneous and metamorphic processes. Pyrope also occurs in ultrahigh-pressure (UHP) metamorphic rocks, as in the Dora-Maira massif in the western Alps. In that massif, nearly pure pyrope occurs in crystals to almost 12 cm in diameter; some of that pyrope has inclusions of coesite, and some has inclusions of enstatite and sapphirine.

Pyrope Garnet is primarily used as a gemstone, set in a variety of types of jewelry for its gorgeous, dark red color. Less-than-flawless specimens are sometimes crushed to use as an abrasive, as a part of a sandpaper called "garnet paper."

With pyrope Garnet being the most common gem ore of garnet, this is the January birthstone you will most often see. Pyrope Garnets were also thought to protect against poison, and chunks of it would be dropped into wine glasses to prevent poisoning deaths.