Amethyst Aquamarine Calming Bracelet

Hold it up to the light and the purple goes see-through.

That is the quickest test there is. Natural amethyst passes light and shows its own weather inside: banding, cloudy patches, a pale zone running through one bead and not the next. Dyed stone tends to come out flat and even, because the colour is sitting on the surface rather than grown into it. The photograph shot against the sky is not a trick of the light. You are seeing straight through the beads.

Amethyst is the stone for a head that will not switch off. Not stress during the day so much as still turning it over at eleven at night. It is a traditional mala stone in Tibetan practice, worn for meditation and for keeping the mind clear rather than crowded, and that is the association it has carried for centuries. If you buy this for one reason, this is the reason.

Aquamarine is the cooling one. Milky pale blue, the colour of shallow water, and worn for what the colour suggests: taking the heat out of a situation. Where amethyst quiets the thinking, aquamarine settles the reacting. The two are strung together often for that reason.

The order is deliberate. Three aquamarine sit at the front, where the bracelet lies across the top of your wrist, then a silver rondelle, a single amethyst, another rondelle and a pair of aquamarine. Amethyst carries on all the way round the back. It reads as a pale panel set into a purple band rather than a mix.

The whole thing is cool toned. Purple, ice blue and silver, with no gold and no warm stone anywhere in it, so it sits with grey, navy and black more easily than most beaded bracelets.

For anyone who does not need calming down so much as switching off. This is a bracelet for the end of the day rather than the middle of it.