Black crystals
You know the colour you want. The hard part is knowing which stone actually owns it.
Black crystals are not one stone. 49 different minerals show up black here, Ammonite, Apache Tears and Astrophyllite among them. Colour is the easiest thing to fake, so it is the worst way to name a stone. Every entry below gives you the test that settles it.
Hold one in your hand?
Point your camera at it. You will get a name, a real-or-fake verdict and what it means for your chart, in seconds.
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Ammonite3.5-4.5 Mohs · organic · root, crownThis was an animal. It swam, it died out with the dinosaurs, and it sank into seabed mud. The mud turned to rock and swapped the shell…
Apache Tears5-6 Mohs · volcanic glass · root, heartIt is not a stone. It is glass, lava that cooled too fast to become anything else. Hold one up to a lamp. The whole pebble glows smoky…
Astrophyllite3-4 Mohs · silicate · crown, third-eye, solar-plexusAstrophyllite grows in a rare kind of igneous rock, in pockets where leftover elements like titanium end up. It fans out from a centre…
Azurite3.5-4 Mohs · carbonate · third-eye, throatAzurite forms at the top of a copper deposit, where water and air have been rotting the ore for a very long time. It is the most…
Black Kyanite4.5-7 Mohs · silicate · root, throatAfter certain people leave, you go around opening windows. Black kyanite gets sold for exactly that feeling. It grows in splayed blades…
Black Obsidian5-6 Mohs · volcanic glass · rootObsidian never got to be a crystal. Lava met air and cooled so fast the atoms stopped where they stood. What you hold is glass, made in…
Black Onyx6.5-7 Mohs · chalcedony · rootSomebody soaked this in sugar water for weeks. Then they cooked it in acid until the sugar turned to carbon inside the pores. That is…
Black Tourmaline7-7.5 Mohs · silicate · rootIt sits by the door, or you meant to put it there. Black, heavy, fine ridges running the length of it. Squeeze it or warm it and it…
Bloodstone6.5-7 Mohs · chalcedony · root, heartBloodstone set inside old lava. Hot water full of silica filled the gas pockets and stiffened, catching green flecks and rust red iron…
Bumblebee Jasper3-5 Mohs · rock (aggregate) · solar-plexus, sacralThis one is quietly falling apart. Left in sun the orange crumbles to powder. A coin will mark it. It formed in a volcanic vent in Java…
Charoite5-6 Mohs · silicate · third-eye, crownCharoite comes from one place on earth. A hot alkaline body pushed into limestone in Siberia and cooked it, and the rock came out violet…
Chrysocolla2.5-7 Mohs · silicate · throat, heartRain got into a copper deposit and worked on it for ages. It broke the ore apart and left this blue-green crust in the cracks. It is the…
Dalmatian Stone6-7 Mohs · rock (aggregate) · root, sacralThose black spots are not tourmaline. The trade has said so for forty years and the trade is wrong. They are arfvedsonite, a softer dark…- Diamond10 Mohs · native element · crownA diamond is carbon that got buried. Around a hundred and fifty kilometres down, hot enough to melt most rock and squeezed harder than…
Garnet6.5-7.5 Mohs · silicate · root, sacralGarnet grew inside rock that was being crushed. Heat and pressure squeezed the root of a mountain, and the garnet crystallised in the…
Hematite5.5-6.5 Mohs · oxide · rootIt looks like machined steel. It is rust. Iron and oxygen joined in an old sea and settled in layers on the floor. Burial pressed those…
Herkimer Diamond7 Mohs · quartz · third-eye, crownHold one up to a window. The faces throw the light straight back, and nobody cut them. They grew that way. Water full of silica crept…
Howlite3.5 Mohs · silicate · crown, third-eyeSomeone dyed it blue and sold it as turquoise. That is not gossip. It is the trade's default move. Howlite formed in old salt flats…
Jadeite Jade6-7 Mohs · silicate · heartIn China, jade has stood for virtue for thousands of years. Not luck. Virtue. Mesoamerican carvers valued it above gold. Most fine…
Jet2.5-4 Mohs · organic · rootA branch fell in the water a hundred and eighty million years ago and sank into the mud. Pressure did the rest. Jet is fossil driftwood…
Labradorite6-6.5 Mohs · feldspar · third-eye, throat, crownGrey and dull, like something off a driveway. Then you tilt it under a lamp and a sheet of blue switches on inside it. That flash is…
Magnetite5-6 Mohs · oxide · rootHold it near a paperclip and the paperclip moves. That is not a trick. This rock is actually magnetic. It crystallized out of cooling…
Mahogany Obsidian5-6 Mohs · volcanic glass · root, sacralThis was lava moving too fast to become a crystal. It cooled into glass instead, and the red-brown clouds are iron that froze the second…
Malachite3.5-4 Mohs · carbonate · heart, solar-plexusMalachite is rust. Copper ore sat in wet ground and the water rebuilt it into a green carbonate, band by band. So it is a copper salt…- Moissanite9.25 to 9.5 Mohs · carbide · crownIn 1893 a French chemist was sorting through fragments of an iron meteorite that had punched a crater into Arizona, and he found tiny…
Moss Agate6.5-7 Mohs · chalcedony · heart, rootThe moss in this is not moss. It is mineral threads that grew inside the silica before it hardened, sharp and three dimensional when…
Nephrite Jade6-6.5 Mohs · silicate · heartIn Aotearoa New Zealand, pounamu is nephrite. Māori tradition holds it as taonga, treasure that carries everyone who held it before you…
Nuummite5.5-6 Mohs · rock (aggregate) · root, third-eyeIt looks like a plain black pebble until you turn it. Then gold and bronze streaks flash across it in hard straight lines and disappear…- Opal5.5 to 6 Mohs · silica · crown, heartOpal is water that got into rock and never came back out. Silica dissolved in groundwater works its way down through cracks in dry…
Orthoceras3-4 Mohs · organic · root, third-eyeThe shape in the slab was alive. A shelled animal, drifting in a warm sea hundreds of millions of years ago. It sank into mud and the…- Pearl2.5 to 3 Mohs · organic · heart, sacralA pearl starts as a problem. Something works its way inside a mollusc and cannot be pushed back out, so the animal covers it. Layer…
Petrified Wood6.5-7 Mohs · organic · rootThis was a tree. It fell into mud or water and got buried before it could rot. Then silica in the groundwater moved in and swapped…
Pietersite6.5-7 Mohs · quartz · third-eye, solar-plexusThis was tiger's eye first. Fine blue fibres in rock, slowly replaced by quartz, all lying parallel. Then the ground moved and tore it…
Rainbow Obsidian5-6 Mohs · volcanic glass · root, third-eyeIt is glass. The lava cooled too fast for crystals to form, so nothing inside got to finish growing. Almost nothing. Tiny rods of…
Red Jasper6.5-7 Mohs · chalcedony · rootRed jasper is quartz too fine to see, stained through with iron oxide. Rust, basically. The same red as old brick and old blood. It…
Rhodonite5.5-6.5 Mohs · silicate · heart, rootRhodonite began as manganese-rich mud on a seafloor. Heat and pressure buried it and cooked it pink over an age you cannot picture. The…
Ruby in Zoisite6-9 Mohs · rock (aggregate) · heart, rootDeep underground, heat and pressure grew two things at once in one rock. Green zoisite. Red corundum, which is the mineral we call ruby…
Sardonyx6.5-7 Mohs · chalcedony · root, sacralRoman cutters wanted a stone they could carve a face into. Sardonyx gave them one, because its bands lie flat and level instead of…
Septarian3-4 Mohs · rock (aggregate) · root, solar-plexusIt started as a lump of mud on an ancient seafloor. The mud hardened into a nodule, then cracked from the inside as it dried out. Then…
Serpentine2.5-6 Mohs · silicate · heart, rootSerpentine is what happens when seawater soaks into rock from far below the ocean floor and turns it into something slick and green…
Shungite3.5-4 Mohs · organic · rootShungite is carbon that settled in a shallow sea about two billion years ago. It got buried and cooked until it became rock. It is older…
Smoky Quartz7 Mohs · quartz · rootSomebody worked out you can do this in an afternoon. Much of the very dark, evenly black smoky quartz on sale was clear quartz until a…
Snowflake Obsidian5-6 Mohs · volcanic glass · root, crownBacklight a thin edge and it glows brown. That is glass. Lava cooled too fast to make crystals and froze the way it was. The white…
Spectrolite6-6.5 Mohs · feldspar · third-eye, crownSpectrolite is labradorite. A Finnish quarry found the darkest material anyone had seen. They gave it a name of its own. The name is the…- Strawberry Quartz (Glass)5-6 Mohs · man-made · heartThis is glass. It was melted in a factory, mostly in China, with copper stirred through it. The red threads are real metal flakes. They…
Sugilite5.5-6.5 Mohs · silicate · third-eye, crownSugilite grew slowly in rock deep underground. Nearly every purple piece in the world came out of one South African mine. There is not…- Synthetic Opal4.5-6.5 Mohs · man-made · crown, heartSomebody built this on purpose. Spheres finer than dust were settled into stacked layers and pressed solid. It is real opal, grown in a…
Tourmalinated Quartz7 Mohs · quartz · root, crownThe black needles grew first. Quartz came later and grew straight around them, sealing them where they stood. Nothing was broken to make…
Turquoise5-6 Mohs · phosphate · throat, third-eyeTurquoise is central to Navajo, Zuni and Puebloan life. It is worn, inherited and made into work by living artists right now. The stone…
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