Shungite Beaded Bracelet

Shungite is soft (Mohs 3.5 to 4) and brittle, and it can leave a fine black residue, so wash your hands after handling and keep it away from light-colored fabrics. Raw shungite can contain trace heavy metals such as lead, so do not ingest it or drink water it has soaked in. Shungite supports wellbeing but is not a substitute for medical care.

Shungite formed nearly two billion years ago from organic-rich sediments, the remains of microscopic life, laid down in a brackish Precambrian lagoon. Buried, heated, and compressed over ages, that organic matter hardened into a dense black carbon rock found in meaningful quantity only around Lake Onega in Karelia, northwestern Russia. Its story is one of life turned to stone.

Shungite is a non-crystalline, carbon-rich mineraloid that mineralogists class as a variety of pyrobitumen. In the trade the name covers a range of grades, from roughly 30 to 50 percent carbon in common matte stone to about 98 percent in rare elite shungite, with the balance mostly silicate minerals. Trace fullerenes, cage-shaped carbon molecules, have been reported in it at parts-per-million levels. High-carbon shungite conducts electricity.

• Peter the Great founded Russia's first spa, Marcial Waters, in Karelia in 1719, and legend holds that he had the black stone supplied to his army to keep drinking water fresh on campaign.
• Karelian tradition holds that Marfa Romanova, mother of the first Romanov tsar, drew strength from a spring near Tolvuya that runs through shungite bedrock during her exile there, and locals came to call it a healing spring.
• Villagers around Lake Onega long believed the black stone kept well and spring water fresh and set pieces of it into their wells, a folk custom handed down in the region long before geologists studied the stone.