Rock & Mineral Encyclopedia
Search and identify 1,000+ rocks, minerals, crystals, and gemstones — with properties, formation, colors, hardness, and how to tell them apart.
Lemurian Seed Quartz
Clear quartz crystals marked by distinctive horizontal ladder-like striations, popularized from Brazil as a metaphysical stone.
crystal
Cactus Quartz
A South African quartz whose central crystal is coated in a cactus-like crust of tiny secondary points, also called spirit quartz.
crystal
Golden Healer Quartz
Quartz colored or coated by golden iron oxides such as limonite or goethite, giving a warm sunlit yellow glow.
crystal
Garden Quartz
Clear quartz filled with mineral inclusions that look like underwater gardens, mossy landscapes, or floating scenery.
crystal
Clear Obsidian
An unusually pure, transparent-to-translucent obsidian with few inclusions; truly water-clear specimens are rare in nature.
igneous
Clear Tourmaline
A transparent, water-clear elbaite tourmaline (achroite), the rare colorless and highly transparent form of the tourmaline group.
gemstoneQuartz Arenite
A clean, mature sandstone made almost entirely of quartz grains, representing extreme weathering, sorting, and recycling of sediment.
sedimentary
Lemon Quartz
A vivid greenish-yellow quartz, usually heat-treated or irradiated, prized for its clean clarity and bright lemon color.
crystal
Milky Quartz
The most common variety of quartz, milky white from microscopic fluid and gas inclusions, forming massive veins worldwide.
crystal
Dumortierite Quartz
Quartz colored blue by inclusions of the mineral dumortierite, giving a denim-like blue ornamental stone harder than dumortierite alone.
gemstone
Quartz Schist
A foliated metamorphic rock dominated by quartz with enough mica to give it a schistose, splitting fabric.
metamorphic
Snow Quartz
An opaque, snow-white variety of quartz whose milky color comes from countless tiny gas and fluid inclusions.
crystal
Aquamarine Matrix
Aquamarine crystals still attached to their natural host rock, prized as mineral specimens showing beryl in its original pocket setting.
mineral
Girasol Quartz
A translucent milky quartz that shows a soft, floating blue-white glow when light passes through it.
crystal
Star Rose Quartz
Rose quartz that displays a six-rayed star (asterism) when cut as a cabochon, caused by microscopic rutile-like inclusions.
gemstoneIce Opal
A clear, glassy, near-colorless opal resembling ice, sometimes with subtle internal flashes of play-of-color.
gemstone
Brandberg Amethyst
A prized Namibian quartz combining amethyst, smoky, and clear quartz in single crystals, often with phantoms and enhydros.
crystal
Herkimer Diamond
Exceptionally clear, naturally double-terminated quartz crystals from Herkimer County, New York, prized for their diamond-like brilliance.
crystal
Amethyst
The purple variety of quartz, colored by iron and natural irradiation, prized as the classic violet birthstone of February.
crystal
Iceland Spar
A transparent, optical-grade variety of calcite famous for strong double refraction, splitting images and light into two rays.
mineral
Quartz-mica Schist
A foliated metamorphic rock of interlayered quartz and mica, producing a sparkling, easily split rock from metamorphosed sandy shales.
metamorphic
Calcite
An extremely common calcium carbonate mineral that comes in nearly every color and shows strong double refraction in clear crystals.
mineral
Geode
A hollow rock nodule whose interior cavity is lined with inward-pointing crystals such as quartz, amethyst, or calcite.
mineral
Uvarovite Garnet
The rare calcium-chromium garnet, famous for its sparkling emerald-green druzy crusts of tiny crystals, the only consistently green garnet.
mineral