The turquoise arrives at the studio in small paper envelopes, and the first thing she does is not string it. She carries one bead to the window and turns it slowly in the daylight.
Some stones are blue all the way through, crossed by brown or black veins that wander like dry riverbeds seen from a plane. Some have a soft, even shine, almost waxy under the thumb. And some are a little too perfect. Look closely and the color has gathered in the cracks, darker where something pooled.
She has a word for each of them. So do we.
Natural turquoise forms slowly, where water seeps through copper-bearing rock. Left untouched, it is often soft and porous, and over the years it can drink in the oils of the skin and shift in color. It is the rarest kind, and the hardest to be sure of.
Stabilized turquoise is natural turquoise infused with clear resin, so it can be cut, drilled and worn every day without crumbling. Much of the turquoise in the world is treated this way. When a supplier confirms a stone is stabilized, the product page says so in plain words, just beneath the Handcrafted Note.
Dyed stone has had its color added, sometimes to pale turquoise, sometimes to another mineral entirely. It can be lovely. It should be called what it is.
And when we cannot confirm how a stone was treated, we call it turquoise-colored. It is a humbler word. We would rather use it than promise something we have not seen proven.
In Tibetan tradition, turquoise is braided into hair and handed from one generation to the next, traditionally linked with the sky. None of that lives in a lab report. But what you pass on should carry its true name.
She slides the bead back into its envelope and writes one word on the flap.