Crystal conundrum!

theFeeLion

Hey lovelies :love:

My wonderful man just gave me an early birthday present to open (he normally says I have to wait until my actual birthday *groan*). It was a kg of tumbled crystals! Yay! My only problem is my crystal knowledge isn't as vast as I would like it to be so I am only able to identify about half of them. Can anyone point me in the direction of a good website for ID-ing them? Or should I put up some pics and descriptions of the ones I don't know?

Any help would be very much appreciated!

[emoji813] Fee
 

Padma

Hey lovelies :love:

My wonderful man just gave me an early birthday present to open (he normally says I have to wait until my actual birthday *groan*). It was a kg of tumbled crystals! Yay! My only problem is my crystal knowledge isn't as vast as I would like it to be so I am only able to identify about half of them. Can anyone point me in the direction of a good website for ID-ing them? Or should I put up some pics and descriptions of the ones I don't know?

Any help would be very much appreciated!

[emoji813] Fee


Pics and descriptions do help! Also, you could try this website: https://www.crystalvaults.com/guides-crystals/

Happy birthday, early, FeeLion, and congrats and the awesome treasure! :love:
 

theFeeLion

Pics and descriptions do help! Also, you could try this website: https://www.crystalvaults.com/guides-crystals/

Happy birthday, early, FeeLion, and congrats and the awesome treasure! :love:
Thanks Padma :D
I love that site and use it all the time :)
I'll take some photos of the ones I'm stuck with (I'm down to 26 of 91) tomorrow when the light is better and do some descriptions to go with them :D
 

theFeeLion

Here's some pics of them all :) if a description is needed for any of them I can provide that too :)

I have some possible id's for some of them (I have labels next to them) but I'm not certain if I have them right. I'll have to do this in a couple of posts...
 

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theFeeLion

I've taken pics of them on both black and white backgrounds so you can get a better idea of the colours
 

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theFeeLion

And finally here's a pic of the rest that I have managed to name myself :D I really need to find a bigger house for them... Either that or eat some more eggs! Lol
 

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Padma

I've taken pics of them on both black and white backgrounds so you can get a better idea of the colours

Unnamed pic 5 - bottom left, green one, looks to me like aventurine; or, if it is very soft, it may be soapstone; the brown one above it, tiger's eye; and the top right yellow looks like citrine.

The brownish one with bits of blue looks to me like spotty Dumortierite. (blue bits being Dumortierite).

Cool collection of stones! :D
 

Trogon

Hi FeelLion! I'm sorry it took me a while to get back to you on those pictures you posted. We've all been busy jumping from forum to forum as we try to squeeze in those last few minutes on The Forum. But I did remember to take a look at them and have a couple of ideas;

The one you have marked as Jade; Jade is possible, it is difficult to tell without a closer look at the grain structure. The other possibility, judging from the color and the way it polished is a light-green colored quartzite. If you can look at it and see that it's made up of lots of small grains compressed together, it's probably quartzite - if it looks more like a smooth, non-grainy piece, it's probably jade.

I'm pretty sure you are right on the white quartz. But a good way to double check is to take a knife with a sharp point and try to scratch it (medium-light pressure is all it takes, don't strike it, just drag the knife across the surface). If it scratches easily, it is not quartz, if it doesn't scratch or only barely scratches, it IS quartz. (You see, quartz is harder than the steel.)

The "yellow quartz" is also probably right. Though I think a slightly more correct term might be yellow jasper. This is where things get tricky; quartz, jasper, agate, chalcedony and of course amethyst, citrine, smoky quartz, and rose quartz. Opal is also related to quartz, as is girasol and several other stones. In general terms a stone's property of translucence seems to be the best way to say whether a stone is "jasper" or "agate"; if a colored quartz-type stone is pretty opaque and mostly a single color, it would be considered jasper - if it is more translucent (ie, some light can pass through smallish pieces) or even semi-transparent, and especially if it has banding or globules of colored spots, it would be an agate. But with all jaspers and agates, they will be as hard as quartz and you won't be able to easily scratch them with a knife point.

In the "unnamed 5a" picture; the whiter stone is almost certainly a tumbled piece of quartz crystal - you can see the transparent areas separated by cloudy areas which is very typical of massed pieces of quartz crystal (where they've been broken up in the extraction process or just weren't good individual crystals to start with). The other two in the top row appear to be agates, though I can't tell a specific variety. The brownish one in the lower left appears to also be an agate. The green one looks like quartzite - you can see how the individual grains show up in that piece. That is the kind of graining you want to look for in that pale greenish-white piece you have.

The photo 6a & 6b also would be agates and/or jaspers.

A few more words about agates and jaspers: Jaspers tend to be mostly in the red-brown-orange-yellow color range, though they can have inclusions of other colors, but these are the most common colors. Also, a given piece of jasper is usually one color or might fade from one color to a similar color (such as red to brown, or orange to yellow), but probably won't have definitive banding. Agates can be in almost any color, ranging from blue, red, brown, white, yellow, green, gray, to almost black. And agates frequently have bands or spots of several colors in one stone, and the banding will be well defined, it won't just fade from one color to another.

As for the esoteric/psychic properties of these stones, you'll find that agates and jaspers will have a lot of similar properties because they are all quartz based stones. They'll actually share some properties with quartz. But quartz crystals, or tumbled clear quartz raises those properties to a much higher level. The properties of an agate or jasper depend a great deal on their color or mix of colors, much in the same way that colored quartz crystals (amethyst, citrine for example) have properties that vary from clear crystal.
 

Trogon

Ah ... I just looked at the last couple of posts. Padma is correct with aventurine ... "aventurine" is, as I understand from my mineralogy studies (a long time ago) a colored variety of quartzite.