Rock & Mineral Encyclopedia

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

Orange Garnet

A trade term for orange garnets, mainly manganese-rich spessartine and the brownish hessonite variety of grossular.

The most common variety of quartz, milky white from microscopic fluid and gas inclusions, forming massive veins worldwide.

The golden-yellow gem variety of beryl, colored by iron, prized for its bright sunshine hue and excellent durability.

A hard, dark variety of chert that knaps into razor-sharp edges and sparks against steel, central to Stone Age technology.

The red to raspberry-pink variety of tourmaline, prized for its vivid ruby-like color that holds under both daylight and artificial light.

A rare sky-blue variety of pectolite found only in the Dominican Republic, prized for its sea-like color and white volcanic patterning.

The blue iron-bearing variety of beryl, forming clear hexagonal crystals prized both as specimens and as a March birthstone gem.

A variety of pyroxenite composed of both orthopyroxene and clinopyroxene with little olivine, found in layered intrusions and the mantle.

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

Tourmaline crystals displaying two or more distinct colors at once, including the famous pink-and-green watermelon variety.

A transparent, optical-grade variety of calcite famous for strong double refraction, splitting images and light into two rays.

An exceptionally hard beryllium aluminum oxide prized for golden hues, sharp cat's-eye effect, and the rare color-change alexandrite variety.