Rock & Mineral Encyclopedia
Search and identify 1,000+ rocks, minerals, crystals, and gemstones — with properties, formation, colors, hardness, and how to tell them apart.
Orange Garnet
A trade term for orange garnets, mainly manganese-rich spessartine and the brownish hessonite variety of grossular.
gemstoneMontana Garnet
Montana Garnet is red almandine recovered from Montana placer gravels, often alongside the state's famous sapphires.
gemstone
Spessartite Garnet
A manganese aluminum garnet glowing in vivid orange to reddish-orange tones, with the finest called mandarin garnet.
gemstone
Melanite Garnet
The titanium-rich black variety of andradite garnet, with a brilliant resinous luster prized for mourning and statement jewelry.
gemstone
Uvarovite Garnet
The rare calcium-chromium garnet, famous for its sparkling emerald-green druzy crusts of tiny crystals, the only consistently green garnet.
mineral
Demantoid Garnet
A rare green andradite garnet famed for fire exceeding diamond and distinctive horsetail inclusions in Russian stones.
gemstoneBekily Garnet
A rare color-change garnet from Bekily, Madagascar, shifting from bluish-green in daylight to purplish-red under warm light, including the famed blue garnets.
gemstone
Ugrandite Garnet
Ugrandite is the calcium garnet series uniting uvarovite, grossular, and andradite, including tsavorite and the fiery demantoid.
mineralGooseberry Garnet
Gooseberry Garnet is a soft green grossular garnet named for its resemblance to the pale, translucent green of ripe gooseberries.
gemstone
Bohemian Garnet
Small, intensely red chrome-pyrope garnets from the Czech Bohemian region, famous for densely set antique Victorian jewelry.
gemstone
Tourmaline Schist
A foliated schist threaded with black tourmaline (schorl) needles, marking boron-rich metamorphic or metasomatic conditions.
metamorphic
Staurolite Schist
A mica schist studded with brown staurolite porphyroblasts, sometimes forming the cross-shaped twins known as fairy stones.
metamorphic
Color Change Garnet
A rare garnet that dramatically shifts color from greenish in daylight to reddish under lamplight, rivaling alexandrite.
gemstone
Merelani Mint Garnet
A delicate vanadium-colored mint-green grossular garnet from the Merelani Hills of Tanzania, the source of tanzanite.
gemstone
Yttrium Aluminum Garnet
A synthetic garnet-structured oxide (YAG) used as a diamond simulant and laser crystal, with no natural counterpart.
gemstone
Paragonite Schist
A pale, silvery schist dominated by paragonite, the sodium-rich white mica, formed in aluminous metamorphic rocks.
metamorphic
Pelitic Schist
A schist derived from clay-rich sediments, rich in mica and often bearing index minerals like garnet, staurolite, or kyanite.
metamorphicMasasi Blue Garnet
Masasi Blue Garnet is a rare vanadium-bearing color-change garnet from Tanzania that appears blue-green by day and purplish-red indoors.
gemstone
Idaho Star Garnet
Idaho's official state gem: a dark almandine garnet showing a four- or rare six-rayed star from oriented rutile inclusions.
gemstone
Ant Hill Garnet
Small, bright chrome-pyrope garnets famously brought to the surface by harvester ants on the Navajo lands of Arizona.
gemstone
Graphite Schist
A dark, foliated schist rich in graphite that leaves a grey-black mark and forms from metamorphosed carbon-rich sediments.
metamorphic
Kyanite Schist
A mica schist containing bladed blue kyanite crystals, a marker of medium- to high-grade metamorphism of aluminous rocks.
metamorphic
Biotite Schist
A foliated metamorphic rock dominated by glittering dark biotite mica, formed from mudstones under medium-grade regional metamorphism.
metamorphic
Chlorite Schist
A soft, green, foliated rock rich in chlorite, formed by low-grade metamorphism of mafic or volcanic rocks.
metamorphic