Green Precious Stones: 14 Names Ranked by Hardness, Treatment and Price

Here is the green gemstone chart first, because a colour name is useless without the species behind it. Two stones can look identical across a table and behave nothing alike once they are set.

And here are the same green gemstone names with the numbers that matter. Hardness resists scratching. Toughness resists chipping and breaking, and it is the column almost no green gemstone list bothers to publish. Both figures below come from the GIA Colored Stone Essentials reference data.

Read the emerald row and the sapphire row next to each other. That single comparison is the whole argument of this page.

Let us be honest about the word. Precious and semi-precious are trade vocabulary from the nineteenth century, not gemmology. The list was short because those were the stones European dealers could reliably get: diamond, ruby, sapphire, emerald. Everything else got the consolation prize.

Tsavorite was not on the list because tsavorite had not been found yet. It was identified in Tanzania in the 1960s and named in 1974. Chrome tourmaline came out of East Africa later still. Neither is less rare than emerald. Both are simply younger than the vocabulary.

We have written a full piece on why the precious and semi-precious split is a marketing myth, so the short version here: the label tells you when a stone entered European commerce. It tells you nothing about rarity, durability or price. A fine tsavorite outprices a commercial emerald by a wide margin, and no dictionary has caught up.

Our opinion, and it is an opinion: the day you choose a stone because a word approves of it, you have stopped choosing the stone. Buy the green you keep looking at.

Emerald is green beryl coloured by chromium and vanadium, and at its best nothing replaces it. That bluish, lit-from-inside green is genuinely unique. We are not here to talk anyone out of it.

But three facts get buried under the romance.

One: almost every emerald is filled. GIA cites the AGTA definition plainly, emeralds are usually enhanced by filling surface-reaching fissures with colourless oil, wax or resin. This is normal, it is centuries old, and it is disclosed on any real report. It also means the stone you buy has fractures reaching its surface. That is why the filler is there.

Two: the filling is not permanent. Oil dries out over five to ten years of wear, and inclusions that were invisible start to show. Re-oiling costs roughly $50 to $150. Routine, but nobody mentions it at purchase.

Three: toughness, not hardness, is the real constraint. At 7.5 to 8 Mohs emerald resists scratches well enough. Its GIA toughness rating of poor to good is the problem, and it is why ultrasonic cleaners are off limits and why bezel settings beat exposed prongs. We go deeper on this in our guide to emerald hardness on the Mohs scale and in the May birthstone guide.

One thing we will say straight: we do not stock emerald. Our sourcing runs through Sri Lanka, and Sri Lanka is not an emerald country. Quoting you emerald prices we never transact would be theatre.

Green sapphire. Mohs 9, GIA toughness excellent, and it is not close.

Green and teal corundum comes out of the same Sri Lankan gravels as the blue material. Iron drives the colour, and the trade name shifts from green to teal as the blue creeps in. Most of it is heated, which is standard for corundum and disclosed. In our trays the teal and green stones run $277 to $312 a carat in the 1.2 to 2.0 carat range, which is a fraction of what commercial emerald costs for a stone that will outlive it.

Behind sapphire sit two more that deserve a look:

• Chrysoberyl at 8.5, excellent toughness, no cleavage. The green material is quiet rather than vivid, olive to yellowish green, and we price it $160 to $230 a carat. Its colour-change cousin is alexandrite, same species, very different price.
• Green spinel at 8, toughness good, and essentially never treated. Ours are bluish green, 3.1 to 6.1 carats, $192 to $341 a carat. Spinel is the connoisseur stone that the market still has not repriced. Full story in our spinel guide.

If the stone is going on a hand that works, cooks, climbs or types all day, this is the shortlist. Browse the green sapphires, the teal sapphires, the chrysoberyl and the spinel we currently hold.

This is the group people arrive at when they stop shopping for a word.

Tsavorite

Grossular garnet coloured by chromium and vanadium, the same elements that colour emerald, which is exactly why a fine tsavorite reads as emerald green to the eye. Mohs 7 to 7.5, toughness fair to good, and it is one of the very few coloured stones that reaches the market with nothing done to it at all. No oil, no heat, no resin. Ours run $501 to $947 a carat, and the gap between those two numbers is pure colour intensity. See the tsavorite we hold.

Demantoid

Andradite garnet, rarer than tsavorite and the only green stone on this page with more fire than a diamond. Mohs 6.5 to 7 makes it a collector stone rather than a daily ring stone. Russian material can show horsetail inclusions, radiating fibres that gemmologists use as an origin marker. We do not currently hold any.

Green and chrome tourmaline

Tourmaline gives you the widest green range of any species, from olive to grass to near blue. Mohs 7 to 7.5, toughness fair. Chrome tourmaline is the chromium-coloured East African material, and it is the one that holds vivid colour in small sizes. Our green tourmaline runs $111 to $543 a carat, and that four-fold spread is saturation, not size. Details in the tourmaline buying guide, stones in the vivid green tourmaline and tourmaline collections.

Most people arrive with a shade in mind rather than a species. Here is the shade-first version.

Light green gemstones. Peridot is the classic, a yellowish green that never goes dark because iron, not chromium, drives its colour. Mohs 6.5 to 7. Green zircon is the sleeper here: soft olive, high lustre, and at $88 to $98 a carat in 4 to 6 carat sizes it is the most stone-per-dollar on this page. Chrysoprase gives you an opaque apple green at chalcedony hardness. See the peridot guide and our zircon.

Dark green precious stones. Green sapphire goes darkest, sometimes close to forest green in indoor light. Dark emerald exists but usually looks lifeless, tone past medium-dark kills the glow. Nephrite and darker jadeite cover the opaque end, and jadeite carries its own treatment grading: A jade is untouched, B jade has been bleached and polymer-filled, C jade is dyed. That distinction is worth more than any colour description you will read.

The rare ones. Demantoid, chrome tourmaline in clean sizes over 2 carats, colour-change alexandrite that runs green in daylight, and gem-quality green diopside. Rare here means genuinely scarce in cuttable quality, not scarce on a marketing page. If a stone is rare and cheap at the same time, one of those two words is doing work it should not be.

This is the section the big green gemstone lists skip, and it is the one that moves money. Two stones of identical colour can differ by a factor of five on treatment alone.

• Filling (emerald). Colourless oil, wax or resin pushed into surface-reaching fissures. Universally accepted, universally disclosed, and graded none, minor, moderate or significant. Green-dyed filler is a different matter entirely and is not acceptable.
• Heat (sapphire, some zircon, some demantoid). Permanent, stable, standard practice for corundum. Unheated green sapphire exists and carries a premium, but it needs a report to claim it.
• Irradiation (some tourmaline). Used to deepen colour. Stable, but it belongs on the disclosure.
• Bleach and polymer (jadeite). The A, B and C grading. B jade can degrade visibly over years.
• Dye (cheap chrysoprase, some chalcedony). The one that ages worst and the one sold most quietly.
• Nothing at all. Tsavorite, green spinel, chrysoberyl and peridot mostly reach the market untouched. That is a genuine feature, and almost nobody advertises it.

Every stone we list is certified by an independent laboratory, not by us. Ilyes sources them, an independent laboratory grades them, and the report is what you buy on. Ask any seller which of the six lines above applies to the stone in front of you. A straight answer takes four seconds. A vague one tells you everything.

A walk through the main green gems, emerald included, from the Gemstones channel.

Published green gemstone guides almost never quote a number. Here are ours, taken straight off the green material we currently hold, divided by carat weight. No tiers invented to flatter the expensive end.

Emerald is missing from that table on purpose, because we do not stock it. For reference, trade retail on certified emerald runs roughly $100 to $500 a carat for commercial material, $500 to $3,000 for good colour with moderate oil, and past $10,000 for fine Colombian stones with minor enhancement. Cross-check those against at least two sellers before you act on them, since they are market ranges rather than our own transactions.

The practical read: for what one carat of good-colour emerald costs, you can buy a 3 carat untreated green spinel, a Mohs 9 teal sapphire and still have change. Whether that trade is right depends entirely on whether emerald green is the green you actually want. Sometimes it is. That is a legitimate answer.

Four questions, in this order.

Where does it go? Daily ring means Mohs 8 and up with good or better toughness: sapphire, chrysoberyl, spinel. Pendant or earrings forgive almost anything, which is where emerald, demantoid and peridot belong. A green gemstone ring lives a harder life than any other setting.

Which green? Use the chart above and pick the shade before the species. Bluish green points to emerald, teal sapphire or green spinel. Pure vivid green points to tsavorite or chrome tourmaline. Yellowish green points to peridot, chrysoberyl or zircon. Our teal sapphire guide and sapphire colour guide break the corundum end down further.

What was done to it? Get the answer in writing on a lab report. Not a house certificate, an independent one.

What is the price per carat, not per stone? A $900 stone means nothing. $900 for 3 carats of untreated spinel and $900 for 1 carat of oiled emerald are different transactions.

On care: warm water, a drop of mild soap, a soft brush, pat dry. Never an ultrasonic or steam cleaner on emerald, jade or anything filled. Store green stones away from sapphire and diamond, which will scratch most of them. More in our jewellery care guide.