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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.