Orange crystals

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

Orange crystals are not one stone. 31 different minerals show up orange here, Amber, Ametrine and Aragonite 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.

• 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…
• Ametrine7 Mohs · quartz · solar-plexus, third-eye, crownIt is one crystal wearing two colours. Purple at one end, gold at the other, grown that way underground. The tell is the seam. Natural…
• 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…
• 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…
• Calcite (Coloured Varieties)3 Mohs · carbonate · sacral, solar-plexus, heartCalcite is lime that water carried and put back down in a hole in the rock. It is soft. A copper coin marks it. Drop vinegar on it and…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• GGolden Healer Quartz7 Mohs · quartz · solar-plexus, crownQuartz grows out of hot silica-rich water working through cracks in rock. Where that water is carrying iron as well, the iron comes out…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• OOpal5.5 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• SSapphire9 Mohs · corundum · throat, third-eyeSapphire and ruby are the same mineral. Both are corundum, aluminium oxide, and what separates them is a trace of something that should…
• 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…
• Selenite2 Mohs · sulphate · crown, third-eyeYou were told to rinse your stones. Do not rinse this one. Water dissolves selenite. Salt etches it. A humid bathroom shelf pits the…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• Sunstone6-6.5 Mohs · feldspar · sacral, solar-plexusTilt it under a lamp. The glitter runs across the whole face at once, then vanishes when you tilt it back. That is metal. Tiny flakes of…
• TTopaz8 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…
• 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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