Rock & Mineral Encyclopedia

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

Scepter Quartz

Quartz with a wider crystal 'cap' that grew over a narrower stem, forming a natural scepter or mushroom shape.

A quartz with a complex skeletal, layered surface of many terminations and etched recesses, also called skeletal or jacare quartz.

Clear or smoky quartz threaded with golden to reddish needles of rutile, also poetically called Venus hair stone.

A warm orange-to-red variety of chalcedony quartz colored by iron oxide, used since antiquity for seals, beads, and cabochons.

Rose quartz that displays a six-rayed star (asterism) when cut as a cabochon, caused by microscopic rutile-like inclusions.