History

Red beryl, formerly known as bixbite and marketed as red emerald or scarlet emerald, is an extremely rare variety of beryl as well as one of the rarest minerals on Earth. This gem is a thousand times more rare than gold. According to the Utah Geological Survey they estimated that one red beryl is found for every 150,000 diamonds.

Red beryl was discovered in 1904 by Maynard Bixby in the Wah Wah mountains in Utah. The greatest concentration of gem-grade red beryl comes from the Ruby-Violet Claim in the Wah Wah Mountains of mid-western Utah, discovered in 1958 by Lamar Hodges, of Fillmore, Utah, while he was prospecting for uranium.