Rock & Mineral Encyclopedia

Search and identify 1,000+ rocks, minerals, crystals, and gemstones — with properties, formation, colors, hardness, and how to tell them apart.

Black Garnet

An opaque black garnet — typically titanium-bearing melanite andradite — historically cut for mourning and Victorian jewelry.

A copper-bearing labradorite feldspar from Oregon, famous for its range of natural colors and glittery aventurescent copper schiller.

A warm golden-brown garnet named for its honey color, typically a hessonite grossular variety with a distinctive treacly internal texture.

A blue-violet zoisite found only in Tanzania, famous for its vivid trichroic color and rarity.

Phosphate-rich sedimentary rock, the world's main source of phosphorus for fertilizers, formed in nutrient-rich marine settings.

A feldspar, better known as sunstone, that sparkles with metallic glints from tiny mineral platelets, an effect called aventurescence.

A rare swirling lilac-to-violet silicate found only in Siberia, prized for its fibrous, chatoyant purple patterns.

Tourmaline displaying chatoyancy, a moving band of light caused by parallel tube-like inclusions, when cut as a cabochon.

Pink beryl (morganite) that shows chatoyancy, a moving band of light, when cut as a cabochon, thanks to parallel tube inclusions.

A hydrous aluminum garnet (hydrogrossular) intermediate between grossular and katoite, common in altered calcium-rich and serpentinized rocks.

Beryl displaying chatoyancy, a bright moving band of light, caused by parallel tube-like inclusions when cut as a cabochon.

A rare greenish-black vanadium sulfide that was historically one of the world's most important ores of vanadium.

A rare garnet that dramatically shifts color from greenish in daylight to reddish under lamplight, rivaling alexandrite.

A manganese-dominant tourmaline, the source of bright yellow to greenish-yellow gem tourmaline, named for its Madagascar type locality.

A spectacularly banded agpaitic nepheline syenite of alternating red eudialyte, black amphibole and white feldspar layers from Ilimaussaq, Greenland.