Libra picks the moonstone by eye

Permission to just like it

Venus rules Libra, and Venus is the part of the old sky that deals with beauty and with taste. That gives this page an unusual license. Every other sign gets an argument about meaning, and there is a good one here too if you want it, but Libra does not need it. Liking the look of a thing is a complete reason, and pretending otherwise is a kind of bad faith.

So the rest of this is written the way you would actually talk about a bracelet you were thinking of buying. What the light does, what it goes with, and how it sits.

What the light actually does

The sheen is blue-white and cool, and it is not on the surface. It appears to sit a millimeter or two under the dome of the stone, which is why moonstone looks lit from inside rather than shiny. The effect is called adularescence, and it comes from very thin alternating layers of feldspar inside the stone scattering light back toward you.

Because it depends on the angle between the light, the stone and your eye, it moves. Held flat under an overhead lamp the stone can look almost gray. Tilt the wrist toward a window and the blue crosses it and settles at one side. Direct sun makes it brightest and least interesting; a bright overcast day, or a room with one lamp in it, is where the stone looks best.

The silver around it is matte on purpose. A polished setting throws its own highlights and competes with the stone for the same light. Matte gives up that contest, and the only thing moving on the bracelet is the sheen.

What it goes with

Cool colors, without much effort. Navy, charcoal, white and black all let the blue read. Camel and oatmeal work as well as any of them, because the warmth sits far enough from the stone to make it look cooler by contrast. The colors it fights are the ones close to it and slightly off, which mostly means lilac and pale sage.

On the wrist: the chain is fine, so it wants to be seen against skin or a plain cuff rather than layered over a knit sleeve. It sits well next to a small watch with a steel case, and it sits badly next to a wide bangle, which makes it look like an afterthought. Worn on the writing hand it will get more scratches on the silver and, in a couple of years, a better surface for it.

The one real decision is metal. Warm yellow gold on the same wrist pushes the stone toward gray, because gold makes anything cool beside it read cooler still and then flatter. Beside silver or white gold the two agree.

The equinox, if you want a reason

There is a symbolic argument available, and it is a light one. Libra opens at the autumn equinox, the day the light and the dark come out even, which is where the scales in the sign come from in the first place. Moonstone's sheen sits in a similar place, not white and not blue but somewhere between, and never settling on one. Take it or leave it. The stone is the same either way, and the other air sign, Gemini, comes at it from an entirely different direction. If you are buying for a Libra rather than as one, the useful fact is the plain one: every stone we set is natural and cut from different rough, so the one that arrives is the only one of its kind, and it was chosen by eye as well.