Name: Phenakite - Type Locality (Rough & Cut Set)
Brand: The Arkenstone
Price: 8500 USD
Availability: InStock

Phenakite - Type Locality (Rough & Cut Set)

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Russian Phenakites have always been desirable among advanced collectors, but for awhile in the 1990's they were impossible to obtain because the New Age healing community was buying them up and cutting them into gems and healing items. This is a great piece that has a large, 3.5 cm crystal at its apex with an adjacent 1.6 cm crystal adjacent to it. It has a coarse black and white "salt and pepper" matrix with intermixed whitish Phenakite and charcoal colored Graphite. This is a piece that I recall seeing first in the 1990s in a friend's collection I later acquired, and I always remembered it. Now, we have matched it to a gorgeous 12.7 carat gemstone obtained in the old Herb Obodda dealer stock. For Russian Phenakite, it is one of more aesthetic and significant matrix specimens I have seen of the material. Most of these are old specimens from old collections and museum expeditions, not contemporary. It comes with an old label which notes in the bottom in Cyrillic, that it is from the Fersman Mineralogical Museum of Russia (Moscow). On the back of that label it notes a date of November 1989 for de-acquisition. (Locality is the updated one as listed from Mindat from the former USSR locality - interestingly, which is already showing this specimen specifically from a past sale: https://www.mindat.org/51R-RP4). As a bonus, this is from the type locality for the species, at the famous Malyshevo emerald deposits! We almost never see good specimens in this day and age.