Rock & Mineral Encyclopedia

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

Champagne Garnet

A soft brownish-golden garnet named for its champagne color, usually a malaia-type pyrope-spessartine blend prized for warm, neutral tones.

A soft blue-gray jasper from the Owyhee region of Oregon and Idaho, prized for its rare, calming blue tones among earthy jaspers.

A soft pink common opal, most famously from Peru, valued for its gentle pastel color rather than play-of-color.

A soft blue common opal, famously from Peru, valued for its serene sky-to-teal color rather than play-of-color.

A soft mint-green variety of common opal, usually opaque and colored by trace copper or nontronite inclusions rather than play-of-color.

A delicate pink to lavender garnet from Tanzania's Umba Valley, a pyrope-spessartine blend often marketed as a soft, light-toned rhodolite.

A very soft sulfate mineral defining Mohs 2, occurring as selenite, satin spar, alabaster, and desert rose, used to make plaster.

A natural sheen obsidian whose black glass displays a soft, velvety rainbow shimmer from aligned magnetite nanoparticles when polished and tilted.

A softly patterned jasper in cream, gray, and tan whose markings can suggest lotus petals, popular for calm, neutral-toned jewelry.

A lithified glacial till, a poorly sorted rock of mixed boulders, pebbles and fine matrix that records ancient glaciations.

The softest mineral on the Mohs scale, talc has a greasy, soapy feel and is the source of talcum powder and soapstone.

A hard, dark, poorly sorted sandstone with a muddy matrix, typically deposited by underwater turbidity currents.

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

A poorly sorted, muddy sandstone with abundant clay matrix between its grains, typically dark and deposited by turbidity currents.