Recently I read online that Rose Quartz is a warming gemstone. As someone who has studied and worked with healing gemstones for decades, I disagree with this. Not only is Rose Quartz not a warming gemstone, but it actually has a cooling nature.
But before I explain why it’s cooling, I’d like to first clarify what it means when healing gemstones are considered warming or cooling.
Warming and Cooling Are a Part of Nature
When we say a gemstone is warming or cooling, it has nothing to do with how a gemstone feels to the touch. Most gemstones feel cool and will warm up from body heat when you wear them close to your skin.
Whether something is warming or cooling describes its inherent disposition. Herbs are known to have either a warming or cooling nature, as do various foods, so it’s not surprising that healing gemstones can be described in this way too.
Temperature is an essential part of nature. The cycles of the seasons and temperature changes reflect a dynamic, living planet. Whether we ourselves feel too warm or too cold depends on our relationship with our local climate and how well we adapt to it.
Excessive heat and cold inside our body reflects our relationship with our own health.
What Do Warming and Cooling Mean?
When the body is out of balance in any way, it is often reflected in excess warmth or coolness in local areas.
A part of the body that is considered too warm or too cold describes how life energy is moving in that area. Where warmth is in excess, energy tends to stay in one place and collect. It typically accumulates and forms blockages. At the same time, it vibrates too quickly or erratically, without organization or functional outcome.
Excess heat can manifest as inflammation, swelling, redness, irritation, or overactivity.
Areas that are too cold tend to be depleted and weakened. There’s not enough energy in the area to sustain boundaries, so its vital energy can leak out and the area can easily be encroached upon. Physical manifestations of coldness include areas that are stiff and achy or have poor circulation or movement.
A condition of excess heat often has depletion or excess coldness at its core. From what I’ve learned from giving thousands of Gemstone Therapy sessions, depletion is an underlying cause of many imbalances. It is characterized by a lack of life energy, which results in a lack of warmth, which can be perceived as excess coldness.
To correct this physical imbalance, the emotions try to compensate. Subconsciously, the person finds a reason to express intensive feelings and this often results in a swing of the pendulum to a state of excess heat.
When the imbalance originates in the emotional body rather than the physical, it often manifests as the vivid expression of hot emotions like anger, jealousy, or discontent. Emotional coldness, at the other extreme, describes a lack of emotion and a disconnect from one’s feelings. Of course, most emotions fall somewhere between these opposites.
Meaning of Warming and Cooling Gemstones
The warming and cooling qualities of gemstones describe the energetic effect they have on the body.
When we say a healing gemstone is warming, it means that it helps neutralize conditions of coldness. Healing gemstones that are cooling neutralize imbalances that involve excess warmth. Warming gemstones neutralize excess coldness.
Gemstones can help mitigate excess heat and cold in the body by lowering one or increasing the other, or doing both. Each gem works in a unique way.
Warming gemstones like Carnelian, Red Spinel, Rhodonite, and Ruby vitalize weakened and depleted areas of the body. Their energetic warming nature balances excess coldness. Cooling gemstones like Lavender Quartz, Aquamarine, Light Green Aventurine, and Rose Quartz balance excess warmth.
Regardless of their influence on heat and cold, both categories of gemstones help the body heal itself by supporting it with their unique vitalizing energies.
Now let’s focus on Rose Quartz and what makes it a cooling gemstone.
3 Reasons Rose Quartz is Cooling
1. Cooling Gemstones Neutralize Excess Heat
As cooling gemstones neutralize excess heat, they help resolve accumulations of unwanted energy. A key effect of Rose Quartz is to help the body release suppressed emotions that build up in the body, particularly in the muscles, often causing stiffness and muscle pain.
Since Rose Quartz helps alleviate excessive, pent-up emotions in the body, then by its very nature, Rose Quartz must be cooling.
2. Cooling Gemstones Are Metal-Element Gemstones
The second reason involves the Five Element Theory of Chinese medicine. Balancing warmth and coolness in the body is a key part of Chinese medicine, which has been practiced for thousands of years.
When a doctor of Chinese medicine suggested I look at the relationship between the five elements and gemstone color, I was skeptical. How could the gemstones possibly be organized into five element categories by their color alone?
But in fact, and to my surprise, they did so—and remarkably well.
White and pastel-colored gemstones categorically fit into the metal element category of the Chinese five element wheel. These gems generally express one or more metal element characteristics. Rose Quartz is among them.
It seems that because Rose Quartz is pink, which is a dilution of the color red, some people mistake this gem as a fire-element stone. In fact, fire-element gemstones have dark or rich red and orange colors. Their natures promote enhanced activity and vitality and support processes that involve building up or tearing down.
But Rose Quartz is soothing and calming, especially emotionally, which is typical of the metal element.
The metal element itself relates to the season of early winter and of the early evening when the outside temperature drops, even on hot days. Metal-element gemstones are cooling.
By color alone, Rose Quartz should have a cooling disposition according to the five elements, and indeed it does.
3. Cooling Gemstones Calm Hot Emotions Like Anger
If Rose Quartz was warming, then it would exacerbate hot emotions like anger, jealousy, and irritability.
But it doesn’t. It calms them instead because it’s cooling. Rose Quartz calms and balances emotions that typically run hot.
If you are familiar with my work, you know I don’t like to apply healing gemstones by themselves, but with partner stones. This is another concept of herbology that also applies very well to Gemstone Therapy. Herbs work better when paired with other herbs that are mutually supportive.
In the same way, healing gemstones work best when paired with symbiotic partners that can support, catalyze, or enhance the work of the primary gemstone, or soften its effects so they aren’t too intense or overpowering.
Wearing Rose Quartz alone can be too cooling and cause excess emotional energy to be released too quickly. What usually happens is that the wearer can’t handle it, finds a reason to remove the gemstones, and the release abates. The wearer claims the Rose Quartz never did anything, when in fact the release was too fast and aborted after only a superficial layer was dispersed. In such cases, it’s likely the person will need other types of support before he’ll be ready for more emotional work.
In a Gemstone Therapy session, we would identify precisely where the support is needed by evaluating color rays, chakras, systems, levels of manifestation, boundary integrity, and more.
Why Pair Rose Quartz with Symbiotic Red Spinel
We add Red Spinel to our Rose Quartz healing necklaces and bracelets to moderate the emotional release.
When Rose Quartz is strung with Red Spinel, the emotional release happens in a measured, rhythmic way. This occurs partly because Red Spinel’s nature is to be rhythmic, but also because Red Spinel is a warming gemstone.
Emotions are usually suppressed because of underlying depletion, which is a cold state. The Red Spinel’s warmth mitigates the depletion and softens the holding areas while the Rose Quartz helps release the excess.
In our Rose Quartz and Red Spinel formula, Red Spinel, which is a dark red color, is present in a smaller amount. Small quantity and deep colors are yin characteristics. Red Spinel is the yin partner in the formula.
The Rose Quartz, being in relatively larger quantity and bright, is considered the yang partner. Yin gemstones tend to work at deeper levels. Red Spinel draws the effects of Rose Quartz to these levels, while also moderating underlying coldness.
Cooling Explains Why Rose Quartz Is the Stone of Love
Historically, Rose Quartz has been considered a gemstone of love. Its cooling nature helps explain this as well.
If two lovers have been hiding their passion for each other (passion being a warm feeling at the very least), it can get stuck in the body, because that’s the nature of excess heat. The longer the couple holds back their feelings, the more these feelings accumulate and the more difficult it will be to express them.
The nature of excessive heat—especially that which is suppressed—tends to be harbored and to get stuck. Cooling Rose Quartz opens the gates to allow the passion to be expressed.
Once that passion is freed and out in the open, the excess heat dissipates.
The cooling Rose Quartz & Red Spinel may also moderate the passion if it’s too hot, but more importantly, it helps release those emotions so that their heat doesn’t start negatively affecting the body.
Clearly, Rose Quartz is a cooling gemstone, and its cooling nature can be helpful in a number of ways. By relieving the body of excess heat, buildups of old suppressed emotions can be finally released; muscle pain and stiffness that these emotions can cause can be relieved; and the physical stress caused by excess heat in the body can be alleviated.
So the next time you’re feeling emotionally out of sorts or find yourself trying to suppress how you truly feel, try wearing Rose Quartz with Red Spinel. Then enjoy the special emotional support that only the Earth’s healing gemstones can provide.
Valuable thankyou. Wearing a black Onyx necklace, alone to release a habit, some time ago, I had found I was not loving and accepting my old habits gently enough to let them go. Adding a Rose Quartz necklace gave me the self-acceptance needed and the habit went easily. Thanks to this article I see the Onyx as being so yang it put it fully and openly in my face and that the Rose Quartz cooled it down its yin way, letting me go inside and gain in my own time the understanding I needed to let go, with that help of Onyx, Your description here of yin and yang partnership and understanding of it, has been so helpful and so long waited for, THANKYOU.
Hi David, thank you for sharing your experience. That’s great that you’re combining the necklaces together to fine tune the type of healing support you want to see in your life. So glad to hear!
very usefull knowledge