Rock & Mineral Encyclopedia

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

Green Opal

A common opal colored green by nickel or chromium impurities, usually opaque and cut into cabochons and beads.

A soft-toned, multicolored jasper with swirling green, mauve, and cream patterns, popular and affordable in the bead trade.

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

A bright, opaque-to-translucent bubblegum-pink elbaite tourmaline, a playful candy-pink variety popular in beads and cabochons.

A hollow rock nodule whose interior cavity is lined with inward-pointing crystals such as quartz, amethyst, or calcite.

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

A translucent common opal from the Andes prized for its serene blue to blue-green color, usually cut into cabochons and beads.

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

Small, smooth, teardrop-shaped beads of basaltic volcanic glass formed from airborne lava droplets, often paired with Pele's hair.

A manganese aluminum garnet glowing in vivid orange to reddish-orange tones, with the finest called mandarin garnet.

A brown fossiliferous chalcedony packed with spiral freshwater snail shells, technically agatized fossil rock from Wyoming.

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