Chicken Blood Bracelet

In China, the color red traditionally symbolizes good luck. Thus, the Chinese often give red seals made from chicken-blood stone to celebrate weddings, birthdays, promotions, and other successes. Although jade, both jadeite and nephrite, is also highly prized (and its folklore more well known in the West), chicken-blood stone is popularly considered a more powerful talisman against evil.

Chicken-blood stone is actually a rock, or mix of minerals, used as a gem material. This fine-grained mixture consists of clay (dickite and kaolinite) and quartz, with varying amounts of cinnabar. The cinnabar content gives this material its red spots, streaks, and patterns. Although the quartz content has a high hardness of 7, clay and cinnabar have very low hardness (2-2.5). This variation makes working with this material quite challenging.