Tigers Eye Beaded Bracelet

Tigers Eye contains fibers of crocidolite, a form of asbestos, sealed inside quartz. Polished stones are considered safe to handle and wear, but never cut, grind, drill or sand rough material, and use only indirect methods for crystal elixirs.

Tigers Eye forms in the banded iron formations of South Africa's Northern Cape, where cracks in crocidolite-bearing rock opened and sealed again and again with silica-rich fluid. Each cycle laid down thin, parallel ribbons of quartz and fibrous crocidolite, and later oxidation turned the iron in those fibers from blue-grey to gold and brown. The major South African deposits were found in the 1880s, and the region remains the stone's best-known source.

Tigers Eye is a chatoyant quartz (silicon dioxide) intergrown with fine fibers of crocidolite, a blue fibrous amphibole, whose iron has oxidized to golden-brown iron oxides. For more than a century it was described as a pseudomorph in which quartz replaced crocidolite fiber for fiber (Wibel, 1873); a 2003 study by Heaney and Fisher reinterpreted it as crack-seal growth of alternating quartz and crocidolite, with the shimmer coming from the fibers themselves. It rates about 7 on the Mohs scale.

• Popular lore holds that Roman soldiers carried Tigers Eye into battle, trusting its watchful band of light to steady their nerve and turn aside harm.
• Crystal lore links the stone to ancient Egypt, where eye-like gems set into sacred statues were said to lend them divine, all-seeing sight.
• Across many traditions it was worn as a talisman against curses and ill will, an eye that kept watch on the wearer's behalf.