Unakite Tumbled Gemstone

Unakite is stable and non-toxic, safe to handle and wear. As with most tumbled stones, avoid prolonged soaking and harsh chemical cleaners, and keep it out of very hard knocks that could chip the softer feldspar.

Unakite takes its name from the Unaka Range of the southern Appalachian Mountains, where American geologists first described it in 1874. It forms where granite is slowly altered deep in the earth, its plain feldspar and quartz interwoven with green epidote until the rock turns mottled rose and moss. Long carried out of the Blue Ridge and later mined in South Africa and beyond, it became a favorite of lapidaries for its calm color and easy polish.

Unakite is an altered granite, a rock rather than a single mineral, made of three intergrown components: salmon-to-rose pink potassium feldspar (orthoclase), pistachio-green epidote, and clear to milky quartz. It forms when granite undergoes hydrothermal alteration or low-grade metamorphism and its calcium-bearing plagioclase is replaced by epidote, producing the characteristic pink-and-green mottling. Because it is a rock, its hardness and composition vary slightly from piece to piece.

• Unakite carries no legend from the ancient world; it was first identified in 1874 in the Unaka Range of Appalachia, yet crystal tradition has since named it a stone of rebirth for the way it brings buried patterns to the surface and lets them go.
• Because it fuses rose-pink feldspar and green epidote in one body, folk practice treats it as a stone of union, holding heart and spirit in balance rather than favoring one over the other.
• In modern crystal lore it is passed hand to hand as a companion for recovery, kept close during convalescence and quiet seasons of renewal.