Yellow crystals

Yellow crystals get their colour from trace metals and light-scattering defects rather than from one shared mineral: 38 different stones read yellow here, Amber, Ametrine and Ammonite 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…
• Ametrine7 Mohs · quartz · solar-plexus, third-eye, crownA single quartz crystal that grew through a temperature gradient, ending up amethyst at one end and citrine at the other, with a boundary y…
• 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…
• 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…
• Bismuth2-2.5 Mohs · man-made · crown, third-eyeElemental bismuth, grown in a saucepan and cooled slowly enough that the edges outrun the faces and produce those stepped rainbow labyrinth…
• Bloodstone6.5-7 Mohs · chalcedony · root, heartDark green chalcedony spattered with hematite, and one of the very few stones whose Christian folklore is fully explicit, the red was said …
• Blue Apatite5 Mohs · phosphate · throat, third-eyeThe mineral your teeth and bones are made of, and the Mohs scale's definition of hardness 5. Its name comes from the Greek for 'to deceive'…
• Blue Goldstone5-6 Mohs · man-made · third-eye, crownCobalt glass with copper crystals suspended in it, sold under a truly excellent name and a truly bad one, 'galaxy stone' is honest poetry, …
• Bumblebee Jasper3-5 Mohs · rock (aggregate) · solar-plexus, sacralNot a jasper at all: banded calcite and anhydrite laced with native sulfur and arsenic sulfides, deposited in a fumarole near Papandayan vo…
• Calcite (Coloured Varieties)3 Mohs · carbonate · sacral, solar-plexus, heartThe most abundant carbonate on earth in its decorative dress, orange and honey from Mexico, mint green from Pakistan, blue from Madagascar,…
• Celestite3-3.5 Mohs · sulfate · throat, third-eye, crownStrontium sulfate, the mineral that makes fireworks red, growing as pale blue crystal-lined cavities in Madagascan and Ohioan sedimentary r…
• Chrysoprase6-7 Mohs · chalcedony · heartThe only chalcedony coloured green by nickel rather than by iron or chromium, which is why the tone is unmistakably apple rather than fores…
• 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 …
• 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 …
• Fluorite4 Mohs · halide · third-eye, throat, heartCalcium fluoride in cubes and octahedra, coloured every shade in the box by lattice defects and trace elements, and the mineral that gave f…
• Jadeite Jade6-7 Mohs · silicate · heartThe other jade, a sodium aluminium pyroxene, rarer than nephrite and the material of the Qing imperial court and Mesoamerican Olmec and May…
• 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 …
• Lapis Lazuli5-6 Mohs · rock (aggregate) · third-eye, throatA rock rather than a mineral, and one that has been mined at Sar-e-Sang in Badakhshan for over six thousand years, the same valley supplied…
• Mookaite6-7 Mohs · chalcedony · root, sacral, solar-plexusThe silicified skeletons of Cretaceous radiolaria, single-celled plankton with glass shells, from the Windalia Radiolarite in Western Austr…
• 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…
• Ocean Jasper6.5-7 Mohs · chalcedony · heart, throatNot really a jasper: an orbicular rhyolite from the north-west Madagascan coast in which silica-rich fluids grew spherulites and then repla…
• Peridot6.5-7 Mohs · silicate · heart, solar-plexusOlivine from the earth's mantle, brought up in basalt, and occasionally arriving from space inside pallasite meteorites. The Egyptians mine…
• 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…
• Prasiolite7 Mohs · quartz · heartAmethyst that went into the furnace and came out green instead of orange, a quirk of which iron sites survive the heat. It is marketed as '…
• Prehnite6-6.5 Mohs · silicate · heart, solar-plexusThe first mineral ever named after a person, Colonel Hendrik von Prehn, who brought it back from the Cape in the 1780s. It grows as pale gr…
• Pyrite6-6.5 Mohs · sulfide · solar-plexus, rootIron sulfide that grows in perfect cubes with striated faces, and has been fooling prospectors so reliably that its nickname is older than …
• Rainbow Obsidian5-6 Mohs · volcanic glass · root, third-eyeBlack glass with layers of aligned nanoscale crystals inside it, spaced closely enough to interfere with light and throw a spectrum out of …
• 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…
• 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…
• Serpentine2.5-6 Mohs · silicate · heart, rootThe rock that forms when seawater cooks peridotite deep in the crust, California's state rock, the world's asbestos problem, and the crysta…
• Spectrolite6-6.5 Mohs · feldspar · third-eye, crownLabradorite that shows the whole spectrum rather than just the blue end, found in quantity at Ylämaa in south-eastern Finland after quarryi…
• Strawberry Quartz (Glass)5-6 Mohs · man-made · heartTwo entirely different things share this name: a scarce natural quartz with red iron-oxide platelets, and an enormous volume of manufacture…
• Sunstone6-6.5 Mohs · feldspar · sacral, solar-plexusFeldspar that trapped sheets of copper or hematite platelets while crystallising, so it flashes metallic orange when the light finds the ri…
• 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 …

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