Grey crystals

You know the colour you want. The hard part is knowing which stone actually owns it.

Grey crystals are not one stone. 50 different minerals show up grey here, Amethyst, Ammonite and Angelite 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.

• Amethyst7 Mohs · quartz · third-eye, crownAmethyst started out as ordinary quartz. A trace of iron got caught in it, and the faint natural radiation of the rock around it worked…
• 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…
• Angelite3.5 Mohs · sulphate · throat, third-eye, crownAngelite is a salt left behind where an ancient sea dried up. Burial and heat drove the water out of it. It wants that water back. Leave…
• 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…
• Bismuth2-2.5 Mohs · man-made · crown, third-eyeA person made this one. Bismuth metal gets melted at around 271 degrees, cooled slowly so it grows in stepped squares, then the liquid…
• 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…
• BBlue Aventurine6.5 to 7 Mohs · quartzite · throat, third-eyeBlue aventurine is a rock, not a crystal. That is the right place to start, because almost everything written about it starts somewhere…
• Blue Kyanite4.5-7 Mohs · silicate · throat, third-eyeKyanite needs burial to exist. Clay rich rock gets pushed down and squeezed until the aluminium in it grows into blue blades. It came…
• Botswana Agate6.5-7 Mohs · chalcedony · crown, sacralBotswana agate built itself inside bubbles in old lava. Water came in, left a layer, dried, came back. Every grey and pink line is one…
• 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…
• Celestite3-3.5 Mohs · sulphate · throat, third-eye, crownCelestite is losing its colour while you look at it. A sunny sill bleaches the blue out and it never comes back. It grew from strontium…
• CChalcedony6 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• DDiamond10 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…
• Galena2.5-2.75 Mohs · sulphide · rootIt is lead. The same lead that ran through Roman pipes and the same lead they took back out of petrol. Galena is soft, so it sheds fine…
• Green Aventurine6.5-7 Mohs · quartz · heartIt began as plain sand on a seabed. Buried, pressed and cooked, the grains welded into one hard rock, and flecks of green mica got…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• Lepidolite2.5-3 Mohs · silicate · heart, third-eye, crownSomebody told you this one holds lithium. It does. The lithium is locked into the rock and it stays there. It cannot reach your blood…
• Magnesite3.5-4.5 Mohs · carbonate · crown, heartSomebody dyed this. Most of the cheap turquoise in a mall case is plain white magnesite that was soaked in blue until it took. Undyed it…
• Milky Quartz7 Mohs · quartz · crownThis is the cheapest thing in the case and it will outlast almost everything beside it. Milky quartz is plain quartz clouded by water…
• MMoissanite9.25 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…
• Moonstone6-6.5 Mohs · feldspar · sacral, third-eye, crownTilt it under a lamp and a blue-white light slides over the surface. Stop tilting and it is gone. Moonstone is feldspar that separated…
• 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…
• Ocean Jasper6.5-7 Mohs · chalcedony · heart, throatIt is not a jasper. Silica soaked into old Madagascan lava and replaced it, keeping the little balls of crystal that grew while the lava…
• Optical Calcite3 Mohs · carbonate · crown, third-eyeSet a clear piece over a line of writing and the line doubles. That is not a trick. Light splits in two on its way through the stone…
• PPearl2.5 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…
• Phantom Quartz7 Mohs · quartz · third-eye, crownLook into it and there is a smaller crystal in there, with the same shape and the same points. It grew. Then it stopped, long enough for…
• 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…
• Prehnite6-6.5 Mohs · silicate · heart, solar-plexusHold it up to a lamp. The green is cloudy rather than clear, and inside it fine fibres run outward from a centre. It grew in gas bubbles…
• Pyrite6-6.5 Mohs · sulphide · solar-plexus, rootPyrite is iron and sulphur. The name comes from the Greek word for fire, because struck against steel it throws a spark. It is not gold…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• Seraphinite2-2.5 Mohs · silicate · heart, crownSeraphinite is softer than your own fingernail. A key or a dropped coin will scar it, and water gets into the layers and ruins it. It…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• Sodalite5.5-6 Mohs · silicate · throat, third-eyeSodalite formed in magma that ran out of silica. Where quartz would normally grow, this blue grew instead. Then it got sold as lapis…
• 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…
• ZZircon6 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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