Opal Fluorite "Tiffany Stone"

Opal fluorite is a very rare stone of aesthetic and colorful patterns. The rarity and value of Opal Fluorite/Tiffany Stone is a result of its locale. The only location where it has been found is at the Brush Wellman Beryllium Mine in the Topaz-Spor Mountains of Juab County's Sevier Desert, in Western Utah.

The discovery of bertrandite, a beryllium-bearing ore, in Utah's Topaz-Spor Mountains in the early 1960s opened the door for Brush Beryllium. Brush bought the right to explore and mine 12,500 publicly owned acres in Utah for $3 million. At the time, company executives weren't even sure that beryllium could economically be culled from bertrandite. Due to the highly speculative nature of the venture, they initially retained only a 30 percent stake in the independent company known as Beryllium Resources. Reassured shortly, that their bet was well placed, Brush Beryllium bought the remaining shares in 1962 and made the operation into the Geological Exploration & Mining Division.

Beryllium, in its natural state is a strong silver-gray, lightweight, hard metallic element. Its modulus of elasticity is about one third greater than that of steel, it has excellent thermal conductivity, and is non-magnetic. Beryllium is lighter than aluminum and stronger than steel, making it an excellent alloying element to harden and strengthen other metals. Brush Wellman is a mine and refining plant located at one of the few sources of concentrated beryllium in the world. The plant is a mill and finishing facility for beryllium, a high-strength, lightweight metal used in military, aerospace, and medical industries. The ore for the plant comes from Brush Wellman's mine, located in the Topaz-Spor Mountains, 50 miles west of Delta, Utah, which is North America's only developed source for the metal. The facility is located here due to the remoteness of the area, as beryllium dust is highly toxic, and their is plenty of power provided by the Inter Mountain Power Project.

This remote Brush Wellman Mine, which used to be open for collectors, has been closed to the public for many years. The rarity of Opal Fluorite is caused by the ore crushing extraction process for beryllium which involves crushing large quantities of material which yield only 1 to 2 percent of Beryllium Ore. They are made even more rare (and consequently expensive) because so few Opal Fluorites ever survived this extraction process.

Tiffany Stone is composed of predominantly Opalized Fluorite (blues, purples and whites) often mixed with many other minerals such as quartz, chalcedony, dolomite, rhodonite, manganese oxides (blacks), bertrandite (white, yellow or pink) that contains the mineral beryllium, which is what the miners were looking for originally to make missile nose cones since the material does not heat up at high speeds, beryl, solid white or translucent-yellowish opal and many other surprises. What is called "Old stock" material came from the miners bringing out pieces or from the people who were allowed to collect the rock off private land. Small amounts of "New stock" material are rarely being made available by the mine owners.

People use all sorts of different names for it, two of the most common being Opal Fluorite, Tiffany Stone, Bertrandite and Beryllium ore. Tiffany Stone is the only name that it is known by that is not trying to pin-point what the rock is comprised of. Some say the name Tiffany Stone came about because the slab slices cut from the nodules reminded the miners of Tiffany glass lamp shades. Others say the name Tiffany Stone came about because of a miner that used to pick up the nodules for his daughter Tiffany. In either case, it is a name that people recognize in association with the nodules. We call it Opal Fluorite