Rock & Mineral Encyclopedia

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

Dragon Vein Agate

A treated chalcedony with a network of crackled veins, usually heated and dyed in vivid colors for affordable, eye-catching beads.

A solid jet-black chalcedony, usually a dyed and treated agate, prized for sleek polished beads, cabochons, and intaglios.

The soft pink, usually cloudy variety of quartz colored by trace titanium or microscopic inclusions, popular for carvings and beads.

A warm orange-to-red variety of chalcedony quartz colored by iron oxide, used since antiquity for seals, beads, and cabochons.

A soft peachy-orange variety of banded chalcedony, naturally iron-tinted or dyed, popular for warm-toned beads and jewelry.

An opaque, porcelain-white common opal prized for its milky, pearl-like appearance and high porosity, often carved or beaded.

A warm-toned jasper named for its autumn-leaf palette of browns, rust, gold, and cream, popular as soothing earth-tone beads.

A rock formed from hot pyroclastic flows, often welded, sometimes containing flattened glass lenses called fiamme.

Smithsonite is a zinc carbonate ore famous for glassy botryoidal crusts in blue-green, pink, and yellow hues.

A sodium-rich alkali feldspar of sodic volcanic rocks, sometimes forming large glassy crystals and the blue-flashing feldspar in larvikite.