Rock & Mineral Encyclopedia

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

Pink Garnet

A trade name for pink garnets, mainly rhodolite, a rose-to-purplish pyrope-almandine blend prized for its bright clean 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 vivid pinkish-red rhodolite garnet named for its raspberry color, a bright pyrope-almandine blend popular in jewelry.

Fine, golden, hair-like strands of basaltic volcanic glass spun from fluid lava droplets during eruptions, named for the Hawaiian volcano goddess.

A group of silicate gemstones best known for deep red but spanning nearly every color, including green tsavorite and orange spessartine.

The classic deep-red garnet — usually almandine or pyrope — long worn as the fiery 'carbuncle' gem and January's birthstone.

A bright strawberry-red garnet, typically an almandine-pyrope blend prized for its juicy, lively red color in jewelry.

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

An organic gem formed inside mollusks from layered nacre, prized for its iridescent luster and classic elegance.

A soft, fine-grained red metamorphosed claystone, sacred to many Native American peoples and carved into ceremonial pipes.

Sandstone altered by metamorphism, with partly recrystallized quartz grains, transitional between true sandstone and quartzite.

A mica schist containing bladed blue kyanite crystals, a marker of medium- to high-grade metamorphism of aluminous rocks.

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

Purple-colored volcanic glass; genuine natural purple obsidian is rare, with much purple obsidian being manufactured colored glass.

A bronze-colored iron sulfide notable for being the most magnetic of the common sulfide minerals and an important nickel host.