For the past month, my worktable has looked less like an artist’s studio and more like a geological laboratory. My mission? To create a convincing faux turquoise.
The journey wasn’t exactly a straight line. It took eight rounds of experimenting, tweaking, muttering and questioning my purpose in life before it finally clicked. The result is a technique I’m genuinely excited about. It lets you create turquoise with as much—or as little—matrix (those beautiful dark veins and inclusions) as you like. Better yet, you can customize the color to mimic everything from vivid Persian Blue to soft robin’s egg, rich teal, blue-green, or even the greenish hues found in other stones.
You’ll need a little patience. This isn’t an instant-gratification project. The process happens in two stages and includes drying time that can range from a few days to several weeks, depending on temperature and humidity.
The finest turquoise is an opaque, vibrant blue mineral that first became famous in the arid landscapes of Iran and Afghanistan. Those remarkable stones gave us the legendary color known as Persian Blue.
Skip this part if you’re not science-y: Natural turquoise begins when rainwater seeps through cracks in rock, dissolving minute amounts of copper along the way. As the water slowly evaporates, the copper reacts with aluminum and phosphorus to deposit teeny tiny layers of turquoise inside fractures in the host rock. Over millions of years, those deposits continue to build. Older turquoise often contains very little surrounding rock, while younger deposits retain more of the host stone, creating the intricate matrix patterns collectors love. If a little iron sneaks into the chemistry, the blue shifts toward green, producing another beautiful variety of turquoise.
One of the joys of making faux turquoise in polymer clay is we’re not limited by geology. Want dramatic black spiderweb matrix? Done. Prefer delicate veins with only a whisper of host rock? Okay. Love the sparkle of iron pyrite woven through the stone? Why not? And since we’re not waiting for mineral-rich groundwater to do the work over a few million years, we get to choose every shade, every inclusion, and every little detail ourselves.
If you’d like to create your own custom turquoise, complete with your favorite colors and matrix patterns, check out my Faux Turquoise Tutorial and start making gemstones that only look like they took eons to form.
