Rock & Mineral Encyclopedia

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

Smoky Obsidian

Translucent smoky-gray obsidian that transmits a hazy light, intermediate between clear and fully black volcanic glass.

Clear or smoky quartz threaded with golden to reddish needles of rutile, also poetically called Venus hair stone.

Clear or milky quartz threaded with black needles of tourmaline (schorl), combining quartz clarity with dramatic dark inclusions.

The blue iron-bearing variety of beryl, forming clear hexagonal crystals prized both as specimens and as a March birthstone gem.

Fine acicular (needle-like) tourmaline crystals, often black schorl, frequently seen as slender inclusions within clear quartz.

A natural zirconium dioxide mineral, hard and refractory, valued as a zirconium source and prized for high-precision U-Pb dating.

A striking blue aluminum silicate famous for bladed crystals and anisotropic hardness that differs dramatically along and across the blade.

The highest-rank coal, a hard, lustrous black rock that burns cleanly with little smoke and high heat output.

A clean, mature sandstone made almost entirely of quartz grains, representing extreme weathering, sorting, and recycling of sediment.

A vivid greenish-yellow quartz, usually heat-treated or irradiated, prized for its clean clarity and bright lemon color.

A trade name for pink garnets, mainly rhodolite, a rose-to-purplish pyrope-almandine blend prized for its bright clean color.

An abundant, brightly colored pyrope-almandine garnet from East Africa, valued for its clean, raspberry-to-red gems at accessible prices.