Rock & Mineral Encyclopedia

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

Hydrogrossular Garnet

A water-bearing massive grossular garnet, usually green or pink, widely used as a tough jade-like carving stone.

A vivid green chromium-bearing diopside, an affordable emerald-like gem mined largely in Siberia.

A silver-white gold-silver telluride and important gold-silver ore, noted for crystals arranged in writing-like graphic patterns.

A South African quartz whose central crystal is coated in a cactus-like crust of tiny secondary points, also called spirit quartz.

A general term for light-colored, fine-grained volcanic rocks rich in quartz and feldspar, like rhyolite.

Clear quartz crystals marked by distinctive horizontal ladder-like striations, popularized from Brazil as a metaphysical stone.

Clear quartz filled with mineral inclusions that look like underwater gardens, mossy landscapes, or floating scenery.

Rose quartz that displays a six-rayed star (asterism) when cut as a cabochon, caused by microscopic rutile-like inclusions.

A pink-to-red quartz colored by iron oxide inclusions that create a speckled, strawberry-like appearance within clear crystal.

A pale jasper threaded with black, fern-like mineral dendrites that mimic plants, trees, and frost despite being inorganic.

Quartz colored blue by inclusions of the mineral dumortierite, giving a denim-like blue ornamental stone harder than dumortierite alone.

The blue-grey relative of tiger's eye, a chatoyant quartz showing a shifting band of light like a bird of prey's eye.

Tabular quartz crossed by a milky white thread-like line marking where the crystal repeatedly cracked and re-healed.

Exceptionally clear, naturally double-terminated quartz crystals from Herkimer County, New York, prized for their diamond-like brilliance.

A black-and-white striped chalcedony-quartz rock whose bold zebra-like banding makes it a popular ornamental and lapidary stone.