Brown crystals

Brown crystals get their colour from trace metals and light-scattering defects rather than from one shared mineral: 39 different stones read brown here, Amber, Ammonite and Apache Tears among them. Colour is the least reliable way to name a stone, so every entry carries the test that settles it.

• Amber2-2.5 Mohs · organic · solar-plexus, sacralTree resin from Eocene forests, polymerised over 30 to 90 million years, and the only gem material that regularly contains a dead animal. T…
• Ammonite3.5-4.5 Mohs · organic · root, crownA cephalopod that built its shell in a logarithmic spiral, lived in the last chamber and used the rest for buoyancy, then went extinct with…
• Apache Tears5-6 Mohs · volcanic glass · root, heartObsidian nodules that survived when the surrounding glass hydrated into crumbly perlite, mineralogists call them marekanite. The American n…
• Aragonite3.5-4 Mohs · carbonate · root, sacral, solar-plexusCalcium carbonate crystallised in the orthorhombic system instead of the trigonal one, which is the only difference between it and calcite …
• Astrophyllite3-4 Mohs · silicate · crown, third-eye, solar-plexusGreek for 'star leaf', and correctly so: a rare titanium silicate that grows in bronze blades radiating from a point, found in alkaline ign…
• Black Obsidian5-6 Mohs · volcanic glass · rootLava that cooled too fast to organise itself into crystals, a natural glass, and the sharpest edge available to any pre-metal culture. Meso…
• Carnelian6.5-7 Mohs · chalcedony · sacral, rootIron-stained chalcedony the colour of a low fire, and one of the oldest worked gemstones on record, Egyptian, Roman and Islamic carvers all…
• Chrysocolla2.5-7 Mohs · silicate · throat, heartA hydrated copper silicate with no fixed hardness, ranging from chalk to gem depending on how much silica got into it. The Greeks named it …
• Citrine (Heat-Treated Amethyst)7 Mohs · quartz · solar-plexus, sacralAmethyst that has been through a furnace and come out the colour of cheap brandy. Nothing dishonest has happened to the mineral, it is stil…
• Citrine (Natural)7 Mohs · quartz · solar-plexus, sacralActual citrine is a quiet, weak-tea yellow and it is genuinely uncommon, most of what the trade calls citrine has been in an oven. The natu…
• Crazy Lace Agate6.5-7 Mohs · chalcedony · solar-plexus, sacralChihuahuan agate that formed in a rock that kept breaking and re-healing, producing banding with no discipline whatsoever. Dealers call it …
• Dalmatian Stone6-7 Mohs · rock (aggregate) · root, sacralNot a jasper and not tourmaline-spotted: a peralkaline microgranite from Chihuahua whose black flecks are arfvedsonite, an amphibole. The e…
• Desert Rose2-3.5 Mohs · sulfate · root, crownGypsum crystallising out of evaporating groundwater in a desert basin, growing around and through the sand until it forms a rosette. Oklaho…
• Fire Agate6.5-7 Mohs · chalcedony · root, sacralChalcedony that grew in stacked layers alternating with films of iron oxide only nanometres thick, so light interferes with itself and the …
• Goldstone5-6 Mohs · man-made · sacral, solar-plexusSeventeenth-century Venetian glass in which metallic copper is crystallised out of the melt under controlled oxygen starvation, a genuinely…
• Hematite5.5-6.5 Mohs · oxide · rootIron oxide, the mineral that makes Mars red and rust red, named from the Greek for blood because of the streak it leaves. Polished it looks…
• Herkimer Diamond7 Mohs · quartz · third-eye, crownNot diamonds, exceptionally clear double-terminated quartz that grew free-floating in 500-million-year-old dolostone pockets in upstate New…
• Iolite7-7.5 Mohs · silicate · third-eye, throatCordierite, transparent and violet-blue, and famous for a story that may well be true: thin slices act as a polarising filter, and there is…
• Jet2.5-4 Mohs · organic · rootFossilised driftwood from Jurassic monkey-puzzle trees, compressed in the shales below Whitby, and the definitive material of Victorian mou…
• Labradorite6-6.5 Mohs · feldspar · third-eye, throat, crownA grey plagioclase feldspar whose internal layering is spaced at exactly the wavelength of visible light, so it throws aurora colours from …
• Leopardskin Jasper6.5-7 Mohs · rock (aggregate) · root, sacralAnother trade name that lies: this is orbicular rhyolite from Chihuahua, a volcanic rock in which silica crystallised into spheres as the m…
• Mahogany Obsidian5-6 Mohs · volcanic glass · root, sacralObsidian stained red-brown by iron oxide, giving the least severe of the volcanic glasses, the swirls are a frozen record of how the lava w…
• Moss Agate6.5-7 Mohs · chalcedony · heart, rootChalcedony that trapped mineral filaments as it formed, producing something that looks convincingly like vegetation and is entirely inorgan…
• Nephrite Jade6-6.5 Mohs · silicate · heartThe jade of ancient China, Māori Aotearoa and neolithic Europe, an amphibole so tough that stone-age cultures made axes of it before anyone…
• Nuummite5.5-6 Mohs · rock (aggregate) · root, third-eyeAn amphibole rock from Nuuk, Greenland, first collected in 1810 and roughly three billion years old, among the oldest material anyone sells…
• Orthoceras3-4 Mohs · organic · root, third-eyeStraight-shelled nautiloids from Devonian and Ordovician seas, quarried by the tonne in the Erfoud region of Morocco and cut into slabs, sp…
• Petrified Wood6.5-7 Mohs · organic · rootWood in which every cell wall was templated and then replaced by silica, molecule by molecule, so the structure survives while none of the …
• Picture Jasper6.5-7 Mohs · chalcedony · root, third-eyeVolcanic ash and mud laid down in still water, compressed, silicified, and then sliced, so the desert scene you are looking at is an actual…
• Pietersite6.5-7 Mohs · quartz · third-eye, solar-plexusTiger's eye that was shattered by tectonics and healed back together at every angle at once, so the light in it looks like weather. Found i…
• Rainbow Moonstone6-6.5 Mohs · feldspar · third-eye, crown, sacralThe best-selling moonstone in the world is not moonstone: it is white labradorite from India and Madagascar, flashing blue by a different o…
• Rutilated Quartz7 Mohs · quartz · solar-plexus, crownQuartz that trapped needles of titanium dioxide as it grew, producing what looks like gold wire frozen mid-flight. Renaissance Europeans ca…
• Sardonyx6.5-7 Mohs · chalcedony · root, sacralStraight-layered agate in red-brown and white, and the standard material for Roman cameos and signet stones because the layers can be under…
• Septarian3-4 Mohs · rock (aggregate) · root, solar-plexusA mud concretion that formed around decaying organic matter on a Cretaceous seafloor, dried, cracked from the inside out, and then had ever…
• Shiva Lingam6-7 Mohs · rock (aggregate) · root, sacral, crownCryptocrystalline quartz cobbles from one stretch of the Narmada river in Madhya Pradesh, collected annually under ancestral rights by spec…
• Smoky Quartz7 Mohs · quartz · rootOrdinary quartz darkened over geological time by natural radiation acting on trace aluminium, a stone that is literally a record of the rad…
• Snowflake Obsidian5-6 Mohs · volcanic glass · root, crownObsidian caught in the act of devitrifying, the white flowers are cristobalite crystals nucleating in glass that is slowly, over geological…
• Spirit Quartz7 Mohs · quartz · crown, third-eyeA quartz prism that grew a second, finer coat of crystals over every face, from a small handful of pipes near Boekenhoutshoek in Mpumalanga…
• Tiger's Eye6.5-7 Mohs · quartz · solar-plexus, rootBlue asbestos fibres replaced molecule by molecule with silica, keeping the fibrous alignment and gaining a hard glassy body, the sheen is …
• Turquoise5-6 Mohs · phosphate · throat, third-eyeA hydrated copper aluminium phosphate that has been mined in Sinai and Iran for over six thousand years and in the American Southwest for a…

FOR ENTERTAINMENT AND REFLECTION. NOT MEDICAL, PSYCHOLOGICAL, FINANCIAL OR LEGAL ADVICE. How this works