Lapis lazuli has been prized for longer than almost any other gemstone on earth. People have been mining it, trading it, and turning it into art for over six thousand years.

The ancient Egyptians crushed it into powder and used it as eyeshadow, they also used to ground it into pigment to paint funeral masks, in some places, it was inlaid into statues and put it in royal tombs. During the Renaissance, lapis-based pigment was quite literally worth more than gold, and reserved only for the very most important parts of paintings, like the robes of the Virgin Mary. They called the pigment ultramarine, which means "beyond the sea," because it had to be imported from thousands of miles away.

The stone itself is not actually a single mineral, it's a rock composed mostly of lazurite, which is what gives it that signature blue color, but if you look closely at a piece of raw lapis, you will quickly notice some tiny flecks of gold scattered through it, that is pyrite, or "fool's gold", these little metallic flakes are part of what makes each piece unique, some people (including me) think they kind of look like stars in a night sky.

However, the blue itself varies too, some lapis is a bright, almost electric blue, while other pieces lean more towards darker shades or even slightly violet. The color comes from sulfur trapped inside the crystal structure, specifically something called the trisulfur radical anion, which absorbs light in a way that produces that rich blue tone, if you see a piece that looks darker, almost navy, it usually means the sulfur content is higher and if it looks pale or has white streaks running through it, that is calcite.

That variation is what makes working with lapis interesting. No two rings ever turn out the same. One might be deep and dramatic with heavy pyrite speckles and another might be brighter and cleaner with more uniform blue. Both are real and both are lapis.

The downside is that lapis is not the hardest stone out there, it sits around five to six on the Mohs scale, which means it can scratch, plus it does not react well to acids either. A drop of lemon juice can actually bleach the color if it sits long enough and that matters if you are wearing a ring every day.

That is why sealing it matters, by setting crushed lapis into a tungsten core and saturating it with CA glue, the stone gets protected. The CA soaks in, fills the gaps, and hardens into a barrier of sorts. The lapis never actually touches your skin, it never touches soap, water, or lemon juice, just sits there behind a layer of clear, stable material, looking exactly the way it did the day the ring was made.

The Egyptians would have probably killed for that technology, instead, they just crushed it, mixed it with gum, and hoped for the best.

I bought a batch of lapis a while back and smashed it into pieces with a hammer, sorted through the fragments, and pack them into rings one at a time. Some turn out bright, some turned out dark, some have so much pyrite they look like they are glittering, and some have almost no pyrite at all so I usually have to manually add it during the ring-making process.

If you want a ring that connects back to something ancient, or if you simply like the color blue, lapis is a good choice. It has been around longer than almost anything else people wear and now it sits inside tungsten, protected, permanent, and ready for another few thousand years.