Goldstone is man made. It is not a mineral, it is not mined, and there is no deposit anywhere in the world where it is dug out of the ground. It is glass, made in a furnace, and the sparkle inside it is copper.

The process is straightforward once you know it. Copper is dissolved into molten glass, and as the glass cools the copper comes back out of solution as thousands of tiny metallic crystals suspended through it. Those crystals are what catch the light, and because they are three-dimensional and scattered at every angle, a single piece will flash across its whole surface rather than only where it is faceted. The colour depends on what went into the melt. Copper gives the warm red-brown and gold version, and that material is usually called goldstone or, in older writing, aventurine glass. Cobalt or manganese gives the deep blue version, which is the one sold on the continent as blue aventurine. Both are the same glass, differing only in what was used to create the glitter.

The history is genuinely murky. Aventurine glass was being made on Murano by the seventeenth century, and the name comes from the Italian per avventura, meaning by chance, from the story that a glassmaker let copper filings fall into a pot of molten glass and found the result too good to throw away. Whether that accident happened or the story grew around the material afterwards is not something anyone can prove now. What does hold up is the trade name. The glittering effect was named aventurescence after the glass, and then the same word was borrowed to describe a completely different, natural mineral, aventurine quartz, which sparkles for an different reason. Natural aventurine and goldstone are often mistaken for each other and they are not related in any way. One is a quartz found in India and Brazil, the other comes out of an oven.

Because it is glass, it sits at around five and a half on the hardness scale and it is brittle rather than tough. It has no crystalline structure, so it will not cleave along a plane the way a mineral does, but it will chip and it does not shrug off a sharp knock.

Traditionally associated with

Goldstone did not exist in the ancient world so doesn't have an ancient tradition. What it does have is a modern tradition, and the record on that is clear enough. In the trade it is traditionally associated with ambition and with the pursuit of a goal, this is believed to be because it looks like a night sky or a handful of sparks. 

It is also one of the materials most often used in modern ritual work as a stand-in for stones that are expensive or hard to source.

How I'd keep it

Treat it like glass, because that is what it is. Warm water with a little washing up liquid and a soft cloth is all it needs, and it should be dried properly rather than left wet. Keep it away from sudden temperature changes, which is what cracks glass, so no boiling water and no moving it between a warm room and a cold one. Store it away from harder pieces so the surface does not pick up scratches, and treat a knock as a genuine risk rather than something it will shrug off.

What to watch for

The only real thing to watch for is a seller describing it as a natural stone, or giving it a mining origin it does not have. It is a beautiful material and there is no reason to dress it up. 

Prices are low across the board because glass is cheap to make. The one other point worth knowing is that the copper version and the blue version are the same product with a different colourant, and some sellers market the blue as blue aventurine quartz, which it is not.

In the shop

There is one piece, the Blue Goldstone and Sterling Silver Triquetra Bracelet at £75. It is the dark blue glass set as a polished cabochon in stamped 925 silver, with the copper crystals scattered through it catching the light as the wrist moves. Every piece in the shop is a one-off, so the bracelet in the photograph is the one that arrives.

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