Identification

Quartz clouded white by minute fluid inclusions. It is vein material, and it is what the California Mother Lode was dug out of.

Pink with black veins is the shop answer. The reference literature gives the colour as rose-pink to brownish red, gray, or yellow.

Baryte and graphite have entries in the international mineral list. Amber has never been ruled on, which is not the same as excluded.

Natural iridescent hematite is real and its cause is still being argued over in the literature. Coated material exists too, and it is not what most people think.

Azurite is a textbook crystal. Chrysocolla is an approved mineral species whose crystal structure has never actually been worked out, which is stranger.

Crystal shapes split into two categories: natural (clusters, points, geodes) and lapidary (spheres, palm stones, towers). Here is what each one is.

Most of what a shop sells as a crystal is one. Crystallographers settle the question by whether a solid’s atoms are ordered, and they settle…

It depends which sparkle you mean. Druzy and pyrite bounce light off many small surfaces, sunstone and moonstone and labradorite work from inside, and spectral…

Yes. Hawk’s eye, the blue variety, is natural, and it is the less altered of the two. The golden colour is what weathering does to…