Mexican Fire Opal is what is up for the week! Yes, Jonathan and Brecken covered opal in 2 prior podcast episodes but thought it would be best to go into a little more detail about this mystical stone. From Aztec lore to the very core of how this opal is formed.
[Warning: we experience some technical difficulties in the middle of the recording so we apologize for the intermittent sound quality.]
00:24:00 Gemma and a little story time
03:05:00 Mexican Fire Opal introduction
03:47:00 Mexican Fire Opal
04:33:00 Aztec name for Opal
06:19:00 Where it is found
07:18:00 How is it formed?
07:41:00 Hardness
07:55:00 How is it formed (continued)
09:18:00 It almost appears to glow
09:51:00 Fire Opal/Mexican Fire opal mix-up
11:23:00 Play of color
11:52:00 Base colors of Fire Opal
12:58:50 Transparency
13:29:00 Faceted Fire Opal
14:34:00 Needles
15:19:00 Water content in opal
16:58:50 Amorphous crystal structure
18:54:00 Leopard Opal
19:58:50 Mystical properties
Mexican Fire Opal is what is up for the week! Yes, Jonathan and Brecken covered opal in 2 prior podcast episodes but thought it would be best to go into a little more detail about this mystical stone. From Aztec lore to the very core of how this opal is formed.
[Warning: we experience some technical difficulties in the middle of the recording so we apologize for the intermittent sound quality.]
00:24:00 Gemma and a little story time
03:05:00 Mexican Fire Opal introduction
03:47:00 Mexican Fire Opal
04:33:00 Aztec name for Opal
06:19:00 Where it is found
07:18:00 How is it formed?
07:41:00 Hardness
07:55:00 How is it formed (continued)
09:18:00 It almost appears to glow
09:51:00 Fire Opal/Mexican Fire opal mix-up
11:23:00 Play of color
11:52:00 Base colors of Fire Opal
12:58:50 Transparency
13:29:00 Faceted Fire Opal
14:34:00 Needles
15:19:00 Water content in opal
16:58:50 Amorphous crystal structure
18:54:00 Leopard Opal
19:58:50 Mystical properties
42- No Viagra, just get Fire Opal!!
Brecken: Gem- gem- gem- gem junkies, Gem Junkies.
Jonathan: Sometimes I think we should bring that back from the first one.
Brecken: Gem- gem- gem- gem- Gem Junkies. Why?
Jonathan: Because I liked it.
Brecken: Welcome to another episode of Gem Junkies. I'm Brecken.
Jonathan: And I'm Jonathan.
Brecken: And we have an exciting week this week. And we have our dog in the room. Our Gemmy dog.
Jonathan: She's in the room, every day.
Brecken: I know, but she's looking fresh today. She got a haircut, so I really appreciate her. I appreciate her haircut and the fact that she doesn't stink anymore.
Jonathan: Yeah. Is it time that we need to post another Gemma picture on Instagram?
Brecken: Maybe she's looking pretty cute these days.
Jonathan: She is looking cute.
Brecken: So Gemma is our pet Pyredoodle. She's a Great Pyrenees - Poodle mix.
Jonathan: Our shop dog here, our office shop dog.
Brecken: She's our guard dog. She thinks she owns the joint. And last night she got trapped in the twins' room.
Jonathan: We put the twins to bed. And she stayed in the room. We didn't notice.
Brecken: We forgot. We shut the door and we left her in there and the poor door was like hiding in the corner.
Jonathan: And we put them down to bed at 7:55.
Brecken: Yeah. It was gonna be a good night for mom and dad. We were gonna relax.
Jonathan: We were like, "Wow, we really got them down early!" They didn't fall asleep until 9:15. Over an hour. No crying, they were playing.
Brecken: I have a time lapse video of them just jumping up and down, running all over the place, flipping this way, flipping that way, talking to each other, you do this, you do that.
Jonathan: And Livy jumped, they were jumping in bed and Livy jumped so hard. She'd jumped. She fell out of bed.
Brecken: Yeah. I had to go in and address that situation.
Jonathan: We had to talk to them about, there's a reason this song, no more monkeys jumping on the bed. It also applies to three-year-old girls.
Brecken: But this whole time, Gemma was trapped in their room and you can watch on the video that I took. She doesn't move.
Jonathan: Like, she's pretending not there. So she was in there for an hour. I didn't get her out until like 8:50.
Brecken: Maybe they were all hyped up.
Jonathan: And they didn't know she was there either. They never knew she was there.
Brecken: They never knew she was there. She was hiding.
Jonathan: She was kind of hiding in a corner, like next to one of their little puffy chairs. Which their room's not that big.
Brecken: I think maybe they were all hyped up because we got our first strawberry out of the garden this year. Maybe that's one. They shared it, a singular strawberry. And you know, it's the homegrown strawberry, so they're really tiny. So we had to share a strawberry.
Jonathan: Mom made them split it.
Brecken: They split it well not. They should split it. There is no chosen one. Yeah. "You are the recipients of the first strawberry of the season." Okay. Anyway.
Jonathan: Should we continue on to our, our actual
Brecken: podcast?
Jonathan: Our topic? Today's topic is Mexican fire opal.
Brecken: Yeah. So our, I believe our second and third episodes of our series, Gem Junkies, were dedicated specifically, solely to opal. But we felt like we didn't get to talk too much about fire opal. Which is in and of itself a very cool gemstone.
Jonathan: Right. And it is very different than Australian. And we talked probably more about Australian opal than anything else during our first year.
Brecken: Australian opal formation. Huge ocean and, you know, water percolates down through cracks. That kind of good stuff with Australian opal. If you want to learn more, listen to episode one and, or two and three.
Mexican fire opal is volcanic opal.
Jonathan: And it was first mined in the 1400's by the Aztec. So it has a much longer history than Australia.
Brecken: There's actually evidence of it being used between 1200 and 1500.
Jonathan: So that would be 1400, right? Somewhere between there.
Brecken: The date 1200 popped up in my research. So I'm just gonna give it a little, a few hundred more years back. All right. But those mines were lost, the location of those mines were lost to antiquity after the Spanish conquistadors made their way over to the Americas and decided that emeralds and gold were the only good things.
Jonathan: So, Brecken what was the Aztec's name for opal?
Brecken: So there are actually two different names. They called them and there should be a disclaimer at the beginning of this episode, that there are a lot of complicated words. And although I did take three years of Spanish in high school, it has all long since been forgotten and Aztec and mine words were not covered in that.
So here we go. I'm gonna try to say this word.
Jonathan: It's very long.
Brecken: It is. "Keet-ZaI-it-zil-poli-italy" (quetzalitzlipyollitli).
Jonathan: Yeah, this is super long word. So they called it the hummingbird stone.
Brecken: No, actually nope. That's a different one. Hold on. That was the "Vit-zit-zil-tech-pah" (vitzitiltecpa).
Jonathan: Oh, you're right. That's right. Both Aztec words?
Brecken: Yes. Well, so the first one I said, I'm not going back there. The Q word. The Q one. Okay. Means "stone of the bird of paradise." Get it? The orange colors, a bird of paradise kinda thing. The V one, the second one. It means "hummingbird stone." And that's because of the iridescent colors of the bird's plumage.
So I'm gonna just speculate here. I'm speculating this. There is no fact to this. But maybe the hummingbird stone was in reference to opals that had play of color that had the green in it. And the bird of paradise stone was in reference to just your common opal orange stone. I'm just throwing that out there because it makes sense to me.
Jonathan: Yeah. It kind of makes sense.
So Mexican fire opal is found in nine different Mexican states, but mostly is only from a couple. But it's got, you know, so basically covers all of central Mexico all the way from the Gulf to the Pacific Ocean.
Brecken: Yeah. And it's in what they called the Highlands near extinct volcanoes. So some of the important states are, and here we go again. Queretaro, Hidalgo, Guerrero, Jalisco, Chihuahua, and San Luis Potosi. That sounded more Italian.
Jonathan: Yeah. It makes a little Italian.
Brecken: So most the majority of the fire opal that we purchase from small local miners in the area comes from Jalisco, from a place called Magdalena. It is, you know, really beautiful, vibrant color.
Jonathan: You wanna go over the scientific details of how it's formed?
Brecken: Oh my gosh. There is so much on how it's formed. Get ready to be bored to death.
Jonathan: Mexican opals crystallize in a hydrothermal system where the hydro silica gels get trapped and concentrated in cavities and fractures within a rhyolitic lava flow. Short and simple.
Brecken: Okay. I'm gonna expand on that.
Jonathan: It's found in rhyolite. Which is harder than, like ironstone or sandstone. That's more sedimentary where, for Australian where Mexicans found in rhyolite, which is much harder.
Brecken: So rhyolite is a silica rich, volcanic rock. And due to its high content of silica, they're pretty viscous lava flows. Viscous-fluid, very fluid lava flows. Rhyolite that cools too quickly to grow crystals. So if it cools too quickly, it won't grow crystals, form obsidian. Uh, slower cooling rhyolite lava forms, microscopic crystals. Now rhyolite eruptions are extremely rare volcanic eruptions and only three have been recorded since the early 1900's of all the volcanic eruptions that happen only three have been recorded.
One in Papa New Guinea, one in Alaska, and one in Chile.
Jonathan: Wow.
Brecken: So it's a fairly rare occurrence. So fire opal is formed in the depths of these ancient volcanoes. And so basically your water seeps into silica rich lava, rhyolite, and fills seams and hollows. And under this incredible pressure, the lava traps water within itself and forms opal.
Which is totally different from your Australian opal formation, which is, you know,
Jonathan: Sedimentary, which takes a lot more time.
Brecken: A lot more time. The cool thing about Mexican fire opal is that it almost appears to glow, right? It has this like "it calls you"
Jonathan: Or they call it a three-dimensional. It has more of like a three dimensional, like in the ones with play of color have like a three dimensionality to them, which is very different than the Australian.
Brecken: Yeah. And they some say that is due to microscopic water molecules that are still trapped within the silica. That, that is what's giving you the unearthly glow is the water kind of reflecting off of the water.
Jonathan: Yeah. So something that we probably should mention about fire opal is, is that some people are confused by the term fire opal, and they think it's any precious, any opal that has play of color.
Brecken: Yeah. We hear this a lot.
Jonathan: "I'm looking for an opal with fire." Well, an opal with fire isn't the same as fire opal.
Brecken: Yeah. And a lot of people just call, you know, regular Australian opal, fire opal, because they believe fire opal means opal with red play of color. Yeah. Uh, so the fire opal Mexican fire opal is due to actually the body color of the gemstone, the base color. And that's due to an iron oxide, which makes the gemstone range from, you know, a brownish orange, to a really fiery cherry red to a, even yellow.
My favorite color is actually the bright, bright orange. That's my favorite.
Jonathan: I like the red. I like more the what they call cherry.
Brecken: That's so rare. I don't think, I've seen maybe just a few of the cherry.
Jonathan: Yeah. Yeah. The Cherry's cool. Um, so basically to, to separate out- anything with play of color is considered precious opal. Without play of color is common opal or they just call it opal. So if you talk about just plain Mexican fire opal, it would actually be Mexican opal without any play of color.
Brecken: Yeah. So common opal.
Jonathan: Whereas Mexican precious fire opal, or precious Mexican fire opal, which makes it really long. It's technically. Mexican fire with play of color.
Brecken: Yeah. And the play of color in Mexican fire, opal, excuse me. Precious Mexican fire opal, jeez Jonathan, is typically a green play of color. It's like a really bright green flash. Sometimes you can pick up a little blues in there. But you don't see a ton of red.
Jonathan: Yeah, not as much. More blues, and greens, some yellows.
Brecken: I pair it a lot with mint garnet, which really seems to pull that bright green flash and flash in it. It's beautiful.
Jonathan: And the other cool thing with Mexican is you can actually get a base color all the way from completely colorless, which people will call either crystal or jelly or water. So that's the colorless and then it can go more to like a white or like a cloudy, hazy white. And then into the yellow and golds, and then into the reds and oranges. And on rare occasion, you even can get a green, which I actually had never seen before. So I Googled it and yeah, you can find it. Cool. There's a green base color and also a blue base color. And it's not like blue, blue, like you're thinking. Like when you think of Peruvian blue. It's not that blue, but it's like, think of like a colorless with a hint of blue.
Brecken: Is that from play of color?
Jonathan: No, no. It actually has like a blue, like a light sky-blue kind of color to it.
Brecken: Cool.
Jonathan: So it's kind of cool that Mexican material, I don't think any other place in the world has opals with so many different base colors.
Brecken: I think one of the most unique things about your Mexican fire opal as a whole, is the transparency of the gemstone. A lot of your opals are opaque or, translucent or,
Jonathan: and they're better that way.
Brecken: Yeah, they're better because it enhances the play of color. But in your Mexican fire opal, where so much of it has very little play of color. Transparency is cool. And so it's one of the types of opal that you see fashioned into faceted gemstones a lot.
You typically don't facet opal. It's just not done. It's typically done in a cab. But in Mexican fire, opal, you see a lot of it faceted into some fun shapes and I've had fun playing with that. We've designed briolettes. A cool collection of earrings that feature fire opal with other gemstones. And I was in Tucson this last year and they, I saw these fire opal briolettes from a literally like across the room and I didn't care how much they were. My hair stood up on end and I was like, these have to come home with me. And they did. And now they're beautiful pair earrings.
Jonathan: And for sale, please buy.
Brecken: Yeah, please get rid of these.
Jonathan: But they, they really do. They don't have any play of color, but they have a great. Glow to them.
Brecken: They have people are so attracted to the color. We sell out a fire opal a lot. We don't buy a lot of fire opal because it's hard to buy.
Jonathan: It's hard to buy. It also has a lot of needles in it. Tube like needles. And you can get a bunch of different kinds of, inclusions in the Mexican fire opal, which are kind of interesting actually.
Brecken: So we are relatively new to the Mexican fire opal. We started buying it what, five years ago or something, Jonathan? And our first go around, we bought a lot of really bright material, but it had a lot of needles in it and we actually didn't notice the needles until we went to set it into jewelry and we started looking really closely and I was like, "Oh, there's a lot of needles." but the past few years we've honed our skills and we really tried to pay attention to that and how those needles will play out when you set it into jewelry.
Okay. So all opal has a water content in it, right? It's typically 3 to 10% water content inside the opal. Sometimes up to 20%.
Jonathan: Is that at the mine or at the point that we actually have it? At the point that it's been cut and polished. Do you think it still is in that 3 to 10% range? I've always heard this, but do you really think that's true?
Brecken: Yeah, I do.
Jonathan: Yeah? So if you like crushed one up and separated it out, you'd actually have some water.
Brecken: I don't know. I guess you could try!
Yeah. So typically your water content is 3 to 10%. Um, some as high as 20%. And I think volcanic opal, especially gets, it has higher water content than your sedimentary than your Australian opal. So it has more of a tendency to be hydrophane, or crack and craze. And that is where Ethiopian opal is also a volcanic opal, but Ethiopian opal has really high water content. Some, as high as 21%.
So a lot of the people that we buy are fire opal from actually leave it out in the desert climate for six months to a year. So that anything that will potentially crack or craze, or actually a lot of your Mexican material will get cloudy.
Jonathan: Yeah, we've seen that happen.
Brecken: We've seen that happen. And so a lot of our cutters or miners will actually what they call, cook it a little bit. By just mining it and then leaving it out in the air desert climate to detect if any of that material is going to crack or craze. And then it happens before they sell it to us, which makes us super happy.
So opal has an amorphous crystal structure.
Jonathan: Right. Which is basically no crystal structure.
Brecken: Yeah. It's Greek for "without shape." And so the internal structure of it is interconnected, like structural blocks, right? So your silica spheres build upon each other.
Jonathan: Like stacking marbles in a plastic tub.
Brecken: Yeah, so it still has a structure, but it doesn't have a habit, a crystal habit. And so if the spheres line up a certain way, you get play of color. Well, because it's kind of like a blob, like amorphous you get some really cool shapes out of it. And a lot of the fire opal that we use is free form, free shape and they basically just carve away the rhyolite. And it's just how, it's just like the, I hate to say glob because it's prettier.
Jonathan: Nodule.
Brecken: Yeah. There you go. It's just basically the shape of the nodule. And we get some, like, we had one that looks like a Cheeto. Remember the Cheeto one?
Jonathan: We still have it still. In a finished piece.
Brecken: We still have it? I love the Cheeto.
Yeah. They come in all these funky shapes, which also makes buying it difficult because you have to think "how might possibly going to set this into jewelry," because it is so, globular. Um, you also see it still with its matrix. So you see it still with that rhyolite matrix, as opposed to your Australian Boulder opal, which is Ironstone. This matrix opal is with rhyolite.
Jonathan: Which can be pink, cream, tan, or brick red.
Brecken: Yeah. I call them Dino eggs.
Jonathan: Or Dragon's eggs I've heard them called Dragon's eggs.
Brecken: Because they look, because they're often shaped in like a cabochon or like an egg shape. So you can still see like little pockets and nodules of opal with play of color in there. And so they kind of look mystical.
Jonathan: Yeah. We haven't done much with those, but I think they're cool.
Brecken: So. We just got reintroduced to Mexican fire opal, but your dad used to buy it, right? Back in the day.
Jonathan: Yeah. He worked with it a little bit and with another, variety, which was called leopard opal.
Brecken: This is new to me. I've never heard of leopard opal.
Jonathan: Which is formed in black, vesicular basalt. And so it's got like little tiny, it looks like leopard spots. And so the voids that are left by gas, bubbles in the molten rock later filled with opal.
Brecken: Did your dad keep any?
Jonathan: I don't know.
Brecken: He probably sold it all. He's in the business of selling.
Jonathan: Yeah. It's kind of interesting. And that's found in Hidalgo, um, in Mexico and it's considered more of like an ornamental stone and it's used more in like carvings and things like that. It's you can still find it. You can google it.
Brecken: New Tucson expedition stone. leopard opal.
Jonathan: Yeah. It's very expensive.
Brecken: That's cool.
Jonathan: Yeah, it's kind of cool, different.
Brecken: All right now onto the mystical properties of fire opal. So like I said, it was used extensively by the Aztecs and the Mayans. They used it to worship the Sun god. We don't really know any of their beliefs associated with the gemstone. It was all lost to antiquity after the Spanish conquistadors arrived. Um, so I'm not really cool with applying Western philosophy of opals on Mexican fire opal. I don't know why I'm just not gonna do it. So it's not cursed. But, physically some of the physical powers of it, it's supposed to heal your kidneys in your back. And, um, anyone listening with children earmuff time, it's supposed to stimulate sexual organs. So there you go. No Viagra, just get fire opal.
Jonathan: it's also supposed to be a wonderful stone for those people who are shy or lack self-confidence.
Brecken: Yeah. So it's good for shy people and those who lack self confidence, because it's supposed to Rouse the fire within them and give a boost to their confidence and bestow courage.
It's also thought to disperse old and long outdated ways of thinking and make way for new ones. So I'm gonna load it up in a box and ship it to Congress. Everyone in Congress is gonna get a fire opal. Um, and the warm and fiery tone has a positive effect on the psyche and it conveys peace, warmth, and harmony.
Also, if you would like to attract customers, just place it in the front window of your business. It's supposed to bring people on in. The mystical powers of fire opal.
Jonathan: It's also supposed to symbolize the joy of the heart and used to attract money.
Brecken: Yeah. Money. Money's always good. Most gemstones are used to attract money. Why? There's something there.
Yeah. And cure the plague.
So thank you for tuning into another episode of Gem Junkies. I hope you enjoyed our exploration into the beautiful gemstone fire opal. If you want to see what we do in our real life, you can follow us at Parlé Gems on Facebook and Instagram.
We'll talk to you later. I'm Brecken
Jonathan: and I'm Jonathan.
Brecken: Thanks for listening. Bye.