Diaspore (rare)

A beautiful "Brilliant Cushion" cut Diaspore gemstone with very slight inclusions and a gentle purplish-pink hue in incandescent lighting but shows more of a yellow-pink hue in LED lighting. Outdoors, the color is more of a pure pink, with no purple overtones. The fact that the stone is over 1 carat makes it a collector quality gemstone.

When it comes to gem quality Diaspore, most people are familiar with the sandy colored gems from Turkey (sometimes marketed as "Zultanite" or "Csarite"), but in 2020 there was a brand-new discovery of purple to pink colored Diaspore reportedly coming from the Nangarhar Province in Afghanistan. One of our best contacts in Pakistan was able to get their hands on a parcel of this material and we're excited that we have some fine quality stones to offer here on our site. These new stones according to GIA "showed a very weak red fluorescence under long-wave ultraviolet light and an irregular chalky yellow fluorescence reaction under short-wave UV. When the samples were examined with daylight-equivalent illumination and compared to incandescent illumination, a slight color shift was observed." This color shift is also seen in the Turkish material, but the Afghani stones seem to be much more faint. With that said, this new and beautiful material is quite limited based upon the scattered information we can find online.

If you're a serious gem collector, or if you're interested in something new and unusual for your collection, be sure to snag this stone now as we don't know when or if we'll have more. For those of you who are curious, Diaspore is durable enough to set into jewelry, though I would recommend a pendant and not a ring for this stone.

Item #DIASAFG106