6 years, 5 months ago-
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Apparently the garnets from the Mahenge region of Tanzania have been given a name — “lotus garnet”.
A posting on a local jeweler’s Facebook page caught my eye. The gems looked like what I have acquired as Mahenge garnets. Sure enough, when I was able to read the text in the ad, that is exactly what it is. I was told that this company had trademarked the name and has the contract for all of the garnet rough from that mining area. See their write up about it at
“https://www.parlegems.com/lore.php?color-gemstone=Lotus Garnet”I did a search and saw this.
Garnet from Mahenge Tanzania
So what is it that you have?
I am working on aquiring some garnets from mozambique, purple color.I think the idea is that the Parle Gem company decided that they could make more money on the gems and jewelry if they gave the Mahenge garnets a cute name. I don’t know my African geography well enough to have much of an idea where Mahenge is other than Tanzania. Probably a lot of consumers would not relate will to stones labeled that way.
The other thing I was told is that they have a contract to buy up all the garnets from that region. So the supply is drying up for folks like us.
So true, I seek the miner as part of my hobby. Asking for four stones to facet sometimes gets a conversation going and making an offer of too little gets a kind laugh. Anyways I find the Garnet to be one of strange with the various RI. I have some small stones I just put on the dip, small enough for accent stones hope a little larger, but if I get 2.5 mm I will be happy as these are my first of this material.
My daughter just landed a four year job in Africa, we have our passports. She is very familiar with Africa and I hope to visit there someday with visiting a mine or two.This November my employer received several “Lotus” garnets from Parle for inspection, hoping we might be able to sell them to clients over Christmas. They were touted as the garnet version of padparadscha sapphire.
The ones we received were a light color, modified with brown. Interestingly enough, they priced a brownish-orange gem higher (per carat) than a brownish-pinkish-orange. Go figure.
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