Sitara

Also known as ‘goldstone’, Sitara is a manufactured gemstone and can take a very smooth polish and be carved into many attractive artefacts and items of jewellery. The most common form of Sitara is reddish-brown, due to the presence of tiny crystals of metallic copper. Some Sitara jewellery items have an intensely coloured glass matrix, usually blue or violet or more rarely green and a more silvery appearance. The manufacturing process for Sitara (goldstone) was discovered in seventeenth-century Venice, although folklore attributes the accidental discovery to an unnamed Italian monastic order, giving rise to the alternate names of ‘monk's gold’ or ‘monkstone’. Other names like ‘stellaria’ and Sun Sitara are thought to be based on the starry internal reflections of the finished gemstone itself.