Malachite is an acquired taste with its bright green hue, but can be stunning in small doses. Have a look at the photo to your right. [1] (COPYRIGHT: I'm so sorry to have to put this here, but I've had trouble with online content theft. Readers are welcome to print my articles for their personal use, but I do not allow my text or photos to be copied to anyone's online site. No one may use my content without written permission from me.)
As you can see, malachite has a striking, even weird appearance. It tends to be dark green, opaque, shiny, and banded with smoky black in concentric rings through the green. It's not to everyone's liking, and I'll admit that I find it unnatural looking. The sharp, deep shiny hue makes me think of the words "poison green." According to Wikipedia, malachite is a copper carbonate mineral [2]. This may account for its unusual bright green appearance.
However, malachite can grow on me in small doses, such as if it is a small stone set in a ring, button earrings, cufflinks, or a tie tack. Malachite as beads is probably where I like the mineral best because it isn't so overpowering and weird looking, and its intense green complements other beads such as turquoise, black onyx, and wood.
As you can see in the photo, the malachite jewelry is all done with silver. This doesn't surprise me. Silver is a cool, neutral, elegant metal that forms an unobtrusive background to minerals and can work with just about anything. It's sort of the blank slate of metals. Gold, on the other hand, begs to be paired with a luminous, soft mineral like pearls or amber.
Good gemstones to pair with malachite include opaque minerals in cool shades of the color spectrum next to green, such as turquoise. Hematite, which has the neutral elegant properties of silver, is also good. You can also consider black beads either in onyx, jet, or black glass.
References:
1. Photo credit – retrieved from Wikipedia at http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Malachite_jewellery_arp.jpg on 1-15-2011. According to Wikipedia, this is a photo of malachite jewelry in a shop window in Bath, England. The prices are 2005 values, in UK pounds. It was photographed by Adrian Pingstone in March 2005 and placed in the public domain. This image I'm using is resized from his original.
2. Malachite, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malachite, retrieved 1-15-2011.
