Brown crystals
You know the colour you want. The hard part is knowing which stone actually owns it.
Brown crystals are not one stone. 44 different minerals show up brown here, Amber, Ammonite and Apache Tears 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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Amber2-2.5 Mohs · organic · solar-plexus, sacralPick it up. Four seconds in your palm and it is warm. Glass and plastic never manage that. It is not a stone. It is tree resin that ran…
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…
Aragonite3.5-4 Mohs · carbonate · root, sacral, solar-plexusAragonite builds itself out of mineral water in caves, in rust orange spikes that all shoot from one centre. It is on borrowed time…
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…
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…
Carnelian6.5-7 Mohs · chalcedony · sacral, rootMost carnelian was helped. Grey agate gets iron stained and baked until the orange comes up, and people have done that since before…- Chalcedony6 to 7 Mohs · quartz · throatChalcedony is quartz that never grew up into crystals. Instead of one clear six sided prism, it is billions of quartz fibres, each…
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…
Citrine (Heat-Treated Amethyst)7 Mohs · quartz · solar-plexus, sacralIt was amethyst. Purple, out of a geode in Brazil, until it went into an oven at around 450 degrees and came out brandy orange for good…
Citrine (Natural)7 Mohs · quartz · solar-plexus, sacralThis pale thing is the real one. Natural citrine is a weak-tea yellow, quartz that took its colour from a trace of iron and the slow…
Crazy Lace Agate6.5-7 Mohs · chalcedony · solar-plexus, sacralHold it up and follow one band with a fingernail. It doubles back, folds over itself and starts again. That is because the rock cracked…
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…
Desert Rose2-3.5 Mohs · sulphate · root, crownA shallow desert pool dried out. As the water left, gypsum crystallised in the wet sand and stacked into petals, closing around the…- 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…
Fire Agate6.5-7 Mohs · chalcedony · root, sacralTilt it under a lamp. Red and gold slide across the domes, then vanish when you hold still. That fire is not pigment. It is films of…
Goldstone5-6 Mohs · man-made · sacral, solar-plexusIn Venice, four hundred years ago, a glassmaker melted sand with copper and shut the air out of the pot. As it cooled, small copper…
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…
Iolite7-7.5 Mohs · silicate · third-eye, throatOld seabed mud got buried under a mountain and cooked until it came out as a different mineral. Turn it under one lamp. Violet blue from…
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…
Leopardskin Jasper6.5-7 Mohs · rock (aggregate) · root, sacralThe name lies twice. It is not jasper, and those are not animal markings. It is old lava that cooled with crystals growing outward from…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Picture Jasper6.5-7 Mohs · chalcedony · root, third-eyeThose are not hills. They are layers of volcanic ash and fine mud that settled in still water, one on top of the next. Silica soaked…
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 Moonstone6-6.5 Mohs · feldspar · third-eye, crown, sacralThis is white labradorite, a feldspar. It is not moonstone at all. Moonstone is a different feldspar. Somebody in the trade renamed it…- Red Tiger's Eye6.5 to 7 Mohs · quartz · root, sacralThis one began as asbestos. Crocidolite, the blue fibrous amphibole, grew in seams inside ancient ironstone, and silica moved through…
Rutilated Quartz7 Mohs · quartz · solar-plexus, crownHold it up to a window. Those gold threads are titanium. They grew as needles in a hot crack in the rock, and quartz crystallised around…
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…
Shiva Lingam6-7 Mohs · rock (aggregate) · root, sacral, crownThis stone carries living religious meaning, so that comes first. Shiva lingam are gathered from one stretch of the Narmada river in…
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…
Spirit Quartz7 Mohs · quartz · crown, third-eyeHold it up. Hundreds of small crystals stand off one big one, pointing every way at once. That is a second life. The first crystal…
Tiger's Eye6.5-7 Mohs · quartz · solar-plexus, rootThis used to be asbestos. Blue crocidolite fibres grew in the rock first, and quartz replaced them one by one. The silk you can see is…- Topaz8 Mohs · nesosilicate · solar-plexus, throatTopaz grows in the last hot breath of a cooling granite, in the cavities and gas pockets where fluorine-rich vapour has nowhere left to…
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…- Zircon6 to 7.5 Mohs · nesosilicate · root, throat, third-eyeStart with the thing the shop counter will not say, because it is the whole reason this stone is treated as cheap. Zircon is not cubic…
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