Having worked with Madagascan minerals over a number of years, grandidierite has always been a interesting and hard to get hold of mineral.
The story went that there were a few localities close to each other in the south of Madagascar near Fort Dauphin; these had been collected out some years ago - meaning that specimens were only available from old collections and dealer stock.
And generally rather opaque and poorly terminated crystals.
That was until a few years ago when quite a few pieces started appearing via mostly Pakistan and Malaysian sources.
An impromptu and quite large influx of material was soon traced back to a new discovery which had appeared somewhat under the radar being dispersed via the gem trade to the markets in these countries.
One of the first people to have and deal with this new material back in 2016 was our very own Ikram Muhammad of Pakistan Minerals.
There is a superb article written about the discovery and grandidierite in general on the GIA website - see link below.
The piece pictured above is an amazing terminated gem crystal, obtained by Ikram and now released from his collection. Before 2016 the best terminated crystal I had seen was a photo of a piece in the Sorbonne collection.
I believe even by the standards of the recent find, although small (8mm tall) Ikram's is an exceptional crystal and worth calling out!!
Also worth calling out for all the Facebook users amongst us.
For the last few months we have had a problem with the "Share" button on the e-Rocks content pages.
I am pleased to say that this problem has been fixed and you can again share things you like into Facebook.
