Has anyone ever heard of Petalite ?

[treysar]

What is it? Does it have similar properties to a diamond?

 

[valeria101]

Yes. It''s something colorless and found in large, flawless, cheap chunks. You may not encounter petalite as often as colorless topaz, damburite, sapphire or zircon. All are promoted as diamond substitutes, but it is not better than the above mentioned in terms of hardness, RI, dispersion or price. At least these are easy to check.

AJS gems used to list Petalite and the gem Library at Multicolour gives the mentioned properties for all the materials mentioned.

 

[rubydick]

Petalite is one of those glorious gemological abstractions, a near-colorless mineral that is occasionally cut and polished.

Understand, you will not find mention of petalite in verse, there are no passages in Marco Polo's Travels singing its praise.

And yet, it is a beautiful stone. Just north of Mogok, in Burma, is a new locality for this stone, northeast of Momeik. I tried to visit the site a few weeks ago, but didn't have the week to spare. Let's simply describe the locality as "remote."

No, it is not a diamond, looks nothing like the fabled adamant. But when you dangle that baby off your finger in front of your friends, just how many of them can even comment? Think about the possibilities...

 

[mogok]

Hello Petalite can be found in several countries typically in Sweden, USA, Brazil, Namibia and Burma. For this last country gem quality crystals are found in the Molo district near Momeik in a lithium and beryllium rich pegmatite along with "mushroom" Tourmaline, Hambergite, Beryl (morganite and aquamarine) Phenakite, Topaz and Quartz. For the Petalite rare colorless specimen was found there one year ago but then recently brownish specimen (more common) were produced. The mine is now difficult to access as the area that was once mined by private groups (mostly from ethnic minorities) is now under military control and most of the mining is now very low scale and illegal.
Petalite has an hardness of 6, present some cleavage and a low SG (2.4). RI is 1.504, 1.51, 1.516.Iit crystise in the monoclinic system.
Here are some examples of Petalite crystals and cut stones:

All the best,

 

[chantal990]

Hi,

I actaully brought a 10mm princess cut loose piece of Petalite a couple of weeks ago and I was very pleasently supprised with how beautiful the stone is. It doesn''t have the sparkle of a diamond but it does sparkle very nicely. It is a stone I would definately reccommed for it''s own beauty as it is rather inexpensive comes with great clarity (mostly eye clean to loupe clean)