Rock & Mineral Encyclopedia

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

Lepidolite

A soft lithium-bearing mica with a lilac to purple color and pearly, flaky sheen, an important ore of lithium.

An exceptionally coarse-grained igneous rock, often granitic, famous for hosting large crystals and many gemstones.

A pegmatitic granite in which quartz and feldspar intergrow to resemble ancient runic or Hebrew script.

A family of sheet silicate minerals that split into thin, flexible, shiny sheets, giving rocks a sparkling, layered appearance.

A pegmatite rock of feldspar intergrown with wedge-shaped quartz that resembles ancient runic or Hebrew writing.

A quartz crystal containing pink to lilac lithium-bearing mineral inclusions that give a soft cloudy lavender or rose coloration.

A rare lithium-aluminum tourmaline with a vacant X site, typically pale pink to colorless and found in lithium pegmatites.

An extremely rare rubidium-dominant alkali feldspar, the rubidium analogue of microcline, found in rare-element granitic pegmatites.

A striking platy, blade-like variety of albite feldspar that grows in fanned aggregates of thin white crystals within granite pegmatites.

A hard zinc-rich member of the spinel group, usually dark blue-green to black, forming octahedral crystals in metamorphic and pegmatitic rocks.