Moonstone

Hardness:
6.0

Ocurrance:
Sri Lanka (Ceylon), Myanmar (Burma), Madagascar, Germany, India, Tanzania, Brazil, United States, Mexico.

Appearance:
Moonstone is opalescent, with a blue or white scheen, sometimes called "schiller", resembling moonshine. Composed of albite and orthoclase feldspar, the albite gives it the bluish color.

Something Extra:
Fine moonstone is quite rare and becoming rarer.

Moonstone almost seems magical with a ghostly shimmering glow floating in a crystalline material.
The Romans thought that moonstone was formed out of moonlight. Moonstone is a variety of
feldspar and the shimmer, which is called schiller or adularescence, is caused by the intergrowth of
two different types of feldspar, with different refractive indexes.