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Moukaite Jasper Beads

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Mouakite Jasper Hand Cut Faceted 12 inch - The Bead Traders

The Bead Traders is the only online bead store you’ll ever need. We pride ourselves in offering a superb selection of freshwater pearls, focal beads, and over 100 varieties of gemstone beads, such as Moukaite Jasper Beads. We offer the best and easiest online shopping experience in affordable beads, guaranteed.

Two things ensure this: Our attentive customer service is by your side every step of the way, and our three-part value pledge brings you our top-of-the-line products at affordable prices. First, our power buys allow us to keep our prices fixed. Because of their buying schedules, other companies raise their retail prices as soon as the price to acquire a bead goes up. We buy bulk so that our prices stay competitive for longer, even if the acquisition cost goes up.

Our any price quality inspection policy means that every product is rigorously and exhaustively examined for any imperfections, regardless of its price point. We don’t give less attention to lower-cost products like others. Finally, unlike others who degrade their inventory and deceive the customer to raise their profits, our no substitution, no downgrade policy prevents secondhand, counterfeit, and substituted inventory.

Mouka-what?

No, it’s not coffee. Moukaite, also sometimes spelled mookaite, gets its name from the place it was discovered and first mined: Mooka Creek, located on a 700,000 acre sheep farm called Mooka Station. The creek is about 100 miles inland from a remote town on the west coast of Australia called Carnarvon. Much of the world’s moukaite jasper beads are sourced from this Australian locale, but moukaite deposits can also be found in Egypt, Brazil, India, Canada, Madagascar, and the United States.

Moukaite is a variety of chalcedony. As such, it has a Mohs hardness rating of 7 and consists of microcrystalline quartz, which means the fine crystal structure of chalcedonic minerals is visible only under a microscope. Chalcedony varieties are categorized based on what geologists and mineralogists call diaphaneity (how easily light passes through them). Moukaite is a jasper because of its opaqueness; no light passes through it.

How’d That Happen?

As an expert crafter, you might be protesting, “but microcrystalline quartz is semitransparent!” That’s true for its pure form, but the jasper in our moukaite jasper beads forms when silica cements fine particulate materials in the quartz. In moukaite jasper’s case, the skeletal fossils of tiny protozoa, called radiolaria, sediment into the quartz over many thousands of years. Their intricate opaline silica skeletons account for the beautiful opaqueness of moukaite jasper beads.

Moukaite’s color range, from pink to light red to yellow, is caused by iron rich groundwater activity interacting with the rock formation. Interestingly enough, Australian locals say that “mooka” is an Aboriginal word for “running water.” Alongside their purely aesthetic functions, minerals such as moukaite jasper beads have been said to have metaphysical properties. Some claim that jasper provides grounding energy which eases the transition into a meditative state.

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