True Pisces Topaz

Old English trēowe, faithful — used as a color modifier since the seventeenth century for hues that read as the canonical version of their family. True red, true blue: the saturation is full, the hue is neither shifted nor adulterated. Sits at the center of the bold and crisp buckets, marking the unequivocal middle of any chromatic family.

Latin pisces, fishes-of-the-zodiac. As a color modifier, pisces implies a two-fishes-and-water-sign-and-Jupiter-Neptune-ruled-mutable-water quality, the visual register of Hellenic-Pisces-and-Aphrodite-Eros-fishes hand-two-fishes-and-water-sign-and-Jupiter-Neptune-ruled-mutable-water Hellenic-Pisces-and-Aphrodite-Eros-fishes-and-Ichthys pisces-and-two-fishes-and-water-sign surfaces under Hellenic-Pisces-and-Aphrodite-Eros-fishes-and-Ichthys late-winter-and-February-and-March-into-April mutable-water-sign-light. Sits at the modifier-and-zodiac end of the grid, parallel to aquarius and aries in usage.

A fluorine aluminum silicate gem, hardness 8 on the Mohs scale, mined for centuries in Ouro Preto, Brazil. Imperial topaz is the prized variety: a warm, slightly pink-shifted gold-orange with the high refractive index of a quality cut stone. Cooler than amber, brighter than honey, with the gem's signature internal fire when held to light. Named for the island of Topazos in the Red Sea, though that source produced peridot instead.