As our readers know, the Pantone Color Institute, nominates a Colour of the Year to comb the world looking for colour influences and to universally appeal to fashion, beauty, industrial design, home furnishings and interior. Remember last year’s colour – Marsala?
Given that one of the Pantone colours for 2016 is called Rose Quartz, we decided to dig in the etymology of the word quartz, which happened to be quite intriguing.
Quartz or Silicone Dioxide is a hard mineral, consisting of silica, found in rocks. Normally, it is colourless and transparent, but it may as well be coloured by impurities and that can make its hexagonal crystals look pretty appealing and aesthetic.
Apart from being good-looking, it turns out that quartz has some important piezoelectric properties. The quartz crystal has its own distinguished frequency of vibration and is used in electronic oscillator circuits – watches, radio transmitters/receivers, etc.
The word quartz has an uncertain origin. In the English language, quartz is a borrowing from the German Quarz. Its use is dated from the first half of the 14th century in Middle High German (area of Bohemia). Further etymology suggests that quartz could be a pet-form variant of twerc – meaning dwarf.
Alternatively, quartz might have derived from a Polish dialect word – kwardy – a variant of twardy, which is a cognate word in Slavonic languages – Czech, Serbian, etc. They all come from the same base with the meaning hard, firm, solid.
According to the meanings of minerals, the rose tinted quartz is called The Love Stone. Its energetic hallmark is that of unconditional love, that opens the heart chakra. This makes this type of quartz suitable for all kinds of love – unconditional, self-love, family love, romantic, etc. It is considered that its strong energy enhances love in virtually any situation. In spiritual practices the loving energy of the rose quartz teaches us to apply this love to ourselves and helps to increase our self-esteem and self-worth.
Rose Quartz – History
The history of the rose quartz as a talisman for relationships is an ancient one – according to different sources it has been used as early as 600 B.C. Facial masks with rose quartz have been found in Egyptian tombs and had beautifying purposes.
The earliest recorded usage of quartz in English is from about 1651 by the German-Dutch alchemist and chemist Johann Rudolf Glauber, in the translation of his work Of The Mineral World from French: “Stones which the Germans call Quartzen and Horstein, containing pure and corporeal gold, although mixed with silver and copper, may be burnt and ground, and extracted with Mercury.”
