Haven Hamilton, age 10, of Tucson, Arizona, for his questions
What is alabaster?
Every rock has its own beauty. If you are a collector then you have your own specimens and have seen museum displays of the so‑celled precious stones. Perhaps you are like Andy who often comes away from these gem displays with a feeling that some of the common stones are just as beautiful, if not more so; Alabaster does not rate as a gem stone, but in a beauty contest it would rate as high as any of them.
A gem stone must have three qualities. It must he hard or fairly hard, it must be beautiful and it must be rare. This last quality makes it a precious stone. Many, many hours of labor are required to find it, Alabaster is a beautiful stone to be sure, But it is not a hard stone and, though not plentiful, it is far from rare.
Alabaster is formed from the mineral gypsum, which is very plentiful almost all over the world. Gypsum is a water‑made mixture of calcium and sulphur. It is often trapped in layers between muddy sediments. Sometimes these layers become pressed into alabaster sandwiched between layers of mud and sandstone. Alabaster is often found in the bed of a dried out salt, lake where streams have brought down dissolved gypsum from the hills.
When polished, alabaster has a waxy gloss and it comes in milky white and a variety of pastel tones. Some alabaster looks like frozen snow and ice, with perhaps a vein or two of black or grey to accent the lily whiteness. The ancient Greeks named this stone for the moon, perhaps because they had a superstition which said that it could best be found by moonlight. More likely, it was because pale alabaster has a moonlike glow and it allows a little sunshine to filter through like moonlight.
Some alabaster is yellow and looks like pale, frozen honey. Some is honey colored and some is pink and looks like a pile of pink rose petals floating in cream. Some is pearly grey and some is mottled with patches of butterscotch brown.
Alabaster is one of the softest of all stones and you can scrape it with your fingernail. It rates in class two on the scale for testing the hardness of a mineral. Only such stones as the talcs in class one are softer than alabaster.
This means that the lovely stone is very easy to carve great beds of it are found around Florence, Italy and much of this alabaster is carved into vases and dainty figurines. If you own one of these hold it up and see how the light filters through it with a pale moon glow. But remember it is a soft and fragile stone. If you drop and break it, it will be almost impossible to mend it. Alabaster may be as lovely as a hard gem stone, but it will not wear as well, so enjoy its fragile beauty while it lasts.