In the shade, it looks gray and almost plain. Then the light catches it and the stone flares blue, green, sometimes gold. A labradorite ring is a tiny northern lights on your finger, and it only shows itself to whoever looks closely.
Why does labradorite change color?
The flashes have nothing to do with pigment. Labradorite is built from very thin stacked layers. Light bounces between them, boosting some colors and canceling out others. The effect has its own name: labradorescence. It depends on how the layers sit and how the stone is cut, so the same ring can look flat one moment and blaze the next, just from a turn of your hand.
A stone from Labrador
It was first described in 1770 by Moravian missionaries on the Labrador coast in Canada, which is where the name comes from. An Inuit legend says the northern lights were once trapped in the coastal rocks. A warrior freed some of them with a strike of his spear, and the lights left behind became labradorite. The stone stands for mystery, intuition and protection, much like its flashes, which only ever show half of themselves.
Which labradorite ring should you choose?
For a piece that gets noticed, Tara has a large 13 x 18 mm oval stone with blue, green and gold flashes on a silver-plated band. Daintier, Ésmée pairs the labradorite with a square-cut zircon: the crisp sparkle of the zircon against the depth of the labradorite is made for fans of toi et moi rings. Somewhere in between, Amara sets its 10 x 9 mm labradorite in an openwork mount. These designs are adjustable. With a hardness of 6 to 6.5, labradorite is a little delicate, so store it on its own, away from knocks.
Read our labradorite guide to learn about its varieties, then complete the look with a labradorite bracelet or more of our labradorite jewelry.
