Peridot (pronounced pear-a-doe) is rich in history and holds powerful healing properties that are perfect for bringing out the wearer’s positive emotional qualities.
It has often been confused for other gems, but with it becoming more popular among the gemstone world, you’ll soon see its uniqueness and fall in love with this green stone. There’s so much to learn about peridot, including how it’s different from emerald, healing properties and a little bit of history.
How Peridot and Emerald are different
Even with it’s rise in popularity, peridot can still be mistaken for other stones, like emerald.
Gemstones come in a wide and vivid range of colours, with no two stones being the same. To the unfamiliar eye it’s easy to mix them up. While emerald is a very popular and easily recognizable stone, there’s another green gem that’s becoming more prominent: Peridot.
Peridot is often confused with Emerald with the varying shades of green, so it’s easy to mistake one for the other. Here’s a quick look at some differences between them:
- Colour: Peridot is an olive-green, while emerald is a deep green
- Birthstone: Peridot is August’s birthstone and emerald is May’s birthstone
- Symbolism: Peridot protects against negative thoughts and emerald represents rebirth
Colour of Peridot
Peridot is named after the French word, peritot, meaning gold. You can spot peridot because of its yellow-green colour, but did you know that it’s one of the only gemstones that comes in a single colour? The tint of the gem itself can vary, depending on the percentage of iron in the crystal, so the gems can range from a yellowish-green, to green, to brownish-green.
Healing properties
The colour green is associated with a lot of different meanings. The most popular being nature, energy, greed and ambition. Luckily peridot is a powerful cleansing stone that alleviates negative emotions like jealousy, bitterness, irritation and greed.
Jealousy is something we all experience in life, whether it’s hearing good news about someone else or feeling like you’ve been overlooked, that negative emotion can cause trouble in your life. Peridot helps ease you out of negative emotions and calms you down from feeling jealous by expelling negative energy.
It also symbolizes strength and is a protective stone, meaning it helps with physical healing. You can associate lot of positive properties to peridot, including good health, restful sleep and peacefulness. When set in gold, the wearer is protected from nightmares.
A little bit of history
Peridot is one of the world’s oldest gems, with records being discovered as early at 1500 BC. It is considered the national gem of Egypt because of its discovery on an island in the Egyptian Red Sea. Legend says the island’s inhabitants were forced to mine and collect the stones. Since the stone gives off a natural glow, the Egyptians called it the “gem of the sun.”
We’re excited to feature August’s birthstone and share all the wonderful things that peridot has to offer. If you’re looking for a way to ward off anxiousness or negative feelings, peridot might just be calling to you.
Shop our peridot jewelry from the August birthstone collection or send us a message for a custom order!
Check Out Our August Birthstone Collection
