Aura Quartz

The quartz is real. It grew in rock like any other piece, and then somebody put it in a vacuum chamber.

A film of vaporised titanium got bonded to the outside, a few atoms thick. That oil slick teal is a made colour from the 1980s.

Aries, you would rather be the first version of a thing than the finished one.

You start hot. Week one you are unstoppable and everybody notices. By week six the noticing stops and so do you.

Somebody praised speed in you before they praised anything else. You were a kid, and it stuck, and now the quiet middle of anything feels like being forgotten.

Nobody forgot you. They just stopped clapping.

Find a chipped edge on a piece of aura quartz and look at it in daylight. Underneath the peacock colour it is plain grey quartz.

The stone is real. The colour is a coating a few atoms thick, and an honest seller will tell you that before you ask.

Taurus, you stopped believing shiny things because of one specific afternoon.

Somebody sold you something and looked pleased with themselves. You worked out what had happened about a week too late.

Now you turn everything over and check the back. People say you are hard to impress. You are just never going to feel that particular way again.

Check the chipped edge. Then decide if you still want it.

Aura quartz is grey quartz wearing a metal skin. The film is titanium or gold, put on in a vacuum chamber, and it is thinner than anything you can feel.

It does not come off in the wash, but it wears where you rub it. So the parts you touch most are the parts that go back to plain.

Gemini, the coating is a few atoms thick and you have been maintaining it for years.

You can be funny about the worst week of your life. You have made a whole table laugh with a story that actually hurt to live through.

It started as a way to get through school and it worked so well you never dropped it. Now the people who love you get the polished version and they think that is you.

Who gets the grey quartz?

Somebody put ordinary quartz in a chamber and bonded vaporised metal to the outside of it. The stone under there never changed.

Nothing was taken away. A layer was added so it would sell, and the label often does not mention it.

Cancer, you changed the outside so nobody would ask about the inside, and the inside has not moved.

You held a whole household together through a long bad stretch and made it look ordinary. Nobody checked on you, because you never once looked like somebody who needed checking on.

That was the deal you made at about nine. Be easy, and stay. You have not renegotiated it since.

Wipe it dry. Then tell one person the truth.

The quartz underneath is properly hard, hard enough to scratch a window. The metal film on top is not.

It survives being dropped better than it survives being loved. Handling wears the colour off the high points first.

Leo, the hard part of you is real and it is the shine on top you keep worrying about.

You are the one who keeps things warm. You notice when somebody is off before they know it themselves. You have never let a silence sit at a table.

You learned that in a house where the weather changed without warning. Reading people was not a talent then. It was how you stayed safe.

You are allowed to be the one who is off.

The quartz took a very long time to grow in rock, the same as any other piece of quartz. Nobody was watching that part.

The colour took a few hours in a chamber in the 1980s. Both of those things are true about the stone in your hand.

Virgo, you have a surface you keep perfect and a person underneath who never gets asked about.

You have rewritten the same email four times today. Meanwhile there is a person you have been meaning to ring since January.

You learned early that if the house was in order the adults were easier. That was a real strategy and it worked. It is not a job you were supposed to keep.

Ring the person. The email is fine.

A person decided this quartz should be teal. It went into a vacuum chamber and came out coated in vaporised metal a few atoms thick.

Some practitioners say a manufactured coating carries no tradition at all. Others love it anyway. Both of those people are being honest.

Libra, the pleasant surface is a few atoms deep and you dread the day somebody scratches it.

Before you answer you run the room. Who will go quiet, who will bring it up later, who will hear a no as a rejection.

You were the child who could hear a change in a voice from the next room. Keeping the peace was a job you got at an age when you should have been getting a bike.

Say the unpopular thing. Nothing falls down.

Under the peacock finish, aura quartz is grey. The colour is a metal film a few atoms thick, and a chipped edge gives it away instantly.

It is permanent, but it rubs off where hands go. The stone did not ask to be coated and it does not pretend otherwise. Chip an edge and the truth is right there.

Scorpio, somebody asked for a shinier finish on you and you went and had one applied.

You did it. You went quiet at dinners, you softened the true sentence, you let go of things you had not let go of at all.

It did not make you easier to love. All it taught you was that the real you is something people have to be protected from.

They do not. They never did.

Tilt it towards a window. The teal slides across the whole surface at once, every face of it, which is how you know the colour sits on top.

Real iridescence lives inside a stone and moves through it. This one is wearing its colour like a coat.

Sagittarius, you put a bright coat on before you leave the house and nobody has met the plain one in years.

You have gone anyway. You have said the thing in the room where everybody else had decided not to. You have taken the road with no signal on it.

Somebody careful let you down badly once. Ever since then you have treated caution as a character flaw, which is unfair to you and to caution.

Do not scrub it. That is all.

The coating on aura quartz is permanent in the sense that it will not wash off. It still wears away where your fingers go.

Salt strips it. A scrub dulls it. The thing that damages it is the same thing that means somebody loved it.

Capricorn, you wear thin exactly where you are loved most, and you call that a fault.

You audit yourself every Sunday night. Only the output counts, so the week you spent talking your brother down scores nothing.

Somebody at home only looked up when you achieved something. You were about eleven when you worked that out, and you have been achieving ever since.

Try one week where nothing gets achieved.

The quartz spent an age growing in rock with nobody watching. The colour took a few hours in a machine in the 1980s.

Both parts are true and the shop usually only mentions one. Underneath the peacock film it is plain grey quartz.

Aquarius, the version of you that people love took an afternoon to build and you are tired of maintaining it.

You have explained a friend to herself so clearly that she cried. You were not showing off. You just see it, and you have done it for three different people this year.

Nobody has done that back for you. You look fine, and looking fine is a coating too, and people take it at face value.

Let one person see the grey underneath.

Somebody bonded vaporised metal onto this quartz in a vacuum chamber. The metal is titanium or gold and it is only a few atoms thick. People have been doing this since the 1980s.

It is a made colour and honest sellers say so. Owning a made thing is fine as long as nobody lied to you about it.

Pisces, there is a bright coat on you that people fell for, and under it you are plain and tired.

You take on whatever is already in a room. By nine at night you cannot work out which parts of the mood you brought in with you.

At home you always knew before anybody spoke. That got called a gift, so nobody thought to teach you where to set it down.

Where would you put it down?