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Peridot is treasured in Hawaii as
the goddess Pele's tears. The island of Oahu even has beaches made out of
tiny grains of peridot. Although Hawaii’s volcanoes have produced some peridot
large enough to be cut into gemstones, virtually all peridot sold in Hawaii
today is from Arizona, another state with extreme geology. The fresh lime
green of peridot is its distinctive signature. Today most peridot is mined,
often by hand, by Native Americans on the San Carlos Reservation in Arizona.
Fine large peridot is found in Burma and large quantities of peridot are also
mined in China. In 1994, an exciting new deposit of fine peridot was discovered
in Pakistan, 15,000 feet above sea level in the far west of the Himalaya Mountains
in the Pakistanian part of Kashmir. Peridot is the birthstone for August.
Peridot tends to have inclusions and large clean gemstones are very rare.
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