How to Use Shungite (Including on Your Phone)

Buy a polished piece and put it where you look at a screen. That is the version of shungite that asks nothing of you. The pendant, the phone tile and the water stones all work too, and the water one has a preparation step worth doing properly.

A polished shungite cube on a desk asks very little. It does not fade in a window, it does not need a cleansing schedule, and it will still be a black cube in ten years.

Shungite reaches the shelf in four different forms, and they are not interchangeable even though they are the same rock. A cube or a pyramid is furniture. A pendant is jewellery. A phone tile is stationery. A bag of loose grains is an ingredient. Deciding which of the four you want is a separate decision from deciding you want shungite, and it is the one that gets skipped at the counter.

What the material is

Shungite is a rock rather than a mineral. It is a carbon-rich metamorphic rock from Karelia in northwest Russia, from the Lake Onega area and the village of Shun’ga that gave it its name, and the deposits are around two billion years old. They are thought to have begun as oil shale before metamorphism worked on them, which makes them one of the earliest known occurrences of oil shale.

The carbon is the character of the stone. Content runs high and reaches up to 98 percent in some material, which is why shungite is matte black rather than glassy black and why the rough grades get sorted by how much they shine. The scientific literature divides shungite by lustre into bright, semi-bright, semi-dull and dull.

Everything else about the stone, including whether it does anything to the electromagnetic fields around a phone and whether it is safe against skin, belongs in a different article. Is shungite safe to wear takes those claims apart properly. This one is about the objects and what you do with them.

Where the piece goes

Placement is the bulk of shungite practice, and it has a shape the rest of the tradition does not. Crystal practice mostly places stones by the body, using the chakras, or by the room, using feng shui logic. Shungite gets placed by the equipment. The desk beside a screen, the shelf near a router, the bedside table where the phone charges overnight: those are the positions the practice describes for it, and they point at objects rather than at people.

A cube, a pyramid or a palm stone is the form that suits that. It sits still, it is visually distinct from everything else in a room full of pale stones, and it needs no maintenance beyond a wipe. Where exactly it goes is a matter of taste, because there is no settled convention on the point.

A pendant gives you the same practice in a portable form. Worn at chest height it is in constant contact, which is what people who like carrying stones are after, and a polished piece is the sensible choice for anything against skin or cloth. Cord and chain both do the job. Wear it at whatever length you will not fidget with.

A pocket piece is the simplest version of all and needs no explanation. A small polished tumble, in a pocket, touched when you think of it.

The phone tile is a small polished chip with an adhesive back, applied to the back of the handset away from the screen. As an object it is a black dot in your field of view every time you turn the phone over, and some people like having it there. If you are buying it for a measurable effect on the phone itself, read the other article first, and if you use wireless charging, check that the tile sits clear of the charging coil before you commit the adhesive.

For the general business of putting an intention on an object you keep in view, how to set intentions with crystals has the mechanics.

The water practice, and what the research says

The fourth form is loose grains, sold for water. The method is to rinse them, drop them into a jug and leave them for several hours or overnight before drinking.

This is the one part of shungite practice that has been looked at directly. Jurgelane and Locs published a study in the Journal of Water and Health in 2021 on exactly this application. They found that shungite releases chemical elements into water, including nickel, copper, lead, cadmium, zinc, chromium and arsenic. Lead and cadmium exceeded the maximum acceptable concentration for drinking water for a few days of use, and nickel exceeded it for up to two weeks.

Their recommendation has two parts, and both are worth carrying. Assess whether you need to do this at all, and if you do, wash the stones with larger volumes of water for a longer period than the instructions supplied with them say.

In practice that means a proper soak-and-discard routine at the start rather than a quick rinse, and treating the first fortnight as preparation rather than use. If that is more attention than you want to give a jug of water, the three placement forms give you shungite without the housekeeping, and that is the argument for the desk piece as a first purchase.

Looking after whichever one you chose

Cleaning is a rinse and a dry cloth. Nothing about the material objects to short contact with water, and that is the whole basis of the water practice, so the usual worries about soaking do not apply. Dust a rough piece with a dry brush instead of rinsing it, because a pitted surface holds moisture in a way a polished one does not.

Keep polished pieces out of a bowl or pouch with harder tumbled stones, which will scuff the finish over time, and give rough pieces their own spot rather than a shared dish.

The Mineral Library explains the geology behind shungite and the other black carbon-bearing materials it gets confused with, at the Crystalance Mineral Library, and that is where to go if the two-billion-year-old oil shale part is the bit you find interesting. A cube of it on a desk is two billion years old, which is a strange thing to keep next to a router.