SILVER OBSIDIAN SILVARIA COFFIN RING SIZE 7

Natural glass: chipped or broken edges are extremely sharp, so handle rough pieces with care and keep them away from small children. Avoid sudden temperature changes. Do not ingest or use in elixirs.

Silver Obsidian is a trade name for obsidian that shows a silver sheen. It forms at the edges of silica-rich lava flows, where the melt cools too quickly to crystallize. Layers of microscopic gas bubbles, stretched flat by the moving lava, were frozen into the glass and now reflect light as a silver shimmer. Most material comes from Mexico, with more from the obsidian fields of the western United States.

Obsidian is a natural volcanic glass, typically 70 percent or more silicon dioxide (SiO2) with aluminum, sodium, potassium and iron oxides. It is amorphous, with no crystal structure, and breaks with a conchoidal fracture. The silver sheen is an optical effect caused by light reflecting off aligned layers of microscopic gas bubbles within the glass. Hardness is about 5 to 5.5 on the Mohs scale.

• The Aztec god Tezcatlipoca, whose name means Smoking Mirror, was depicted with an obsidian mirror, and Mexica priests used polished obsidian mirrors for divination. The story belongs to obsidian as a whole, not to the silver variety alone.
• John Dee, adviser to Elizabeth I, used a polished obsidian mirror of Aztec origin in his attempts to speak with spirits. The mirror is now held by the British Museum.
• Pliny the Elder wrote in the first century that obsidian was named for Obsius, a Roman who found the stone in Ethiopia, and described dark obsidian mirrors that gave back shadows rather than clear images.