Lavender Obsidian Identification Guide

What Lavender Obsidian Looks Like

Lavender obsidian is a natural volcanic glass with a soft purple to grayish-violet body color. The color is usually subtle and translucent at thin edges, ranging from pale lilac to smoky mauve, and it often shows gentle banding or a misty internal cloudiness from tiny mineral inclusions and microscopic bubbles. Luster is bright and glassy (vitreous), and broken surfaces show a smooth, curved conchoidal fracture with sharp edges. Like all obsidian it has no crystal structure and no visible grains.

Step-by-Step Field ID Checklist

1. Check the luster and feel. True obsidian is glossy and smooth, like bottle glass, often slightly warm to the touch compared with quartz.
2. Look at thin edges in light. Lavender obsidian is translucent purple at the edges; thick pieces look darker and more opaque.
3. Inspect the fracture. Hunt for the characteristic shell-shaped conchoidal breaks with razor-sharp rims.
4. Look for natural cloudiness or banding, not perfectly uniform machine-made color.
5. Confirm no crystals or cleavage. It should be amorphous glass throughout.

Key Diagnostic Tests

• Hardness: Mohs ~5 to 5.5; a steel knife scratches it only with difficulty, and it scratches glass at about the same level.
• Streak: White to pale, regardless of body color.
• Fracture: Conchoidal, the single most reliable obsidian trait.
• Density: ~2.4 g/cm3, noticeably light for a glassy stone.
• Acid: No reaction to HCl.

Common Look-Alikes and How to Tell Them Apart

• Dyed or manufactured glass (slag glass): Manmade glass often has perfectly even color, mold seams, trapped round bubbles in rows, or a too-bright artificial purple. Natural lavender obsidian shows irregular wispy banding and natural inclusions. Be skeptical of vivid, candy-purple uniform pieces sold cheaply.
• Purple chalcedony / amethyst: These are crystalline quartz (Mohs 7), harder than obsidian, and amethyst forms visible hexagonal crystals; chalcedony has a waxier luster and no conchoidal glass fracture.
• Lavender fluorite: Much softer (Mohs 4), shows cubic cleavage and flat cleavage planes, which obsidian never does.
• Lepidolite: Micaceous, flaky, and far softer, with a pearly sheen.

Where Lavender Obsidian Is Typically Found

Obsidian forms from rapidly cooled, high-silica (rhyolitic) lava. Purple-tinted varieties are uncommon and are usually marketed from obsidian-rich volcanic regions such as Mexico, the western United States (Oregon, California, Nevada), and parts of Armenia and Iceland. Note that much vividly colored 'lavender obsidian' on the market is actually colored or treated glass, so provenance and the tests above matter.