Crystals for grief

The crystals people reach for around grief are Amber, Angelite and Apache Tears, 26 stones in all. the ones people reach for at 3am. Every entry below states what the mineral actually is, how to tell a real one from a dyed or heated lookalike, and what each of the twelve signs is told about 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…
• Angelite3.5 Mohs · sulfate · throat, third-eye, crownAnhydrite, calcium sulfate with the water taken out, in a soft periwinkle from Peru, given a marketing name in the 1980s and now permanentl…
• 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…
• Black Onyx6.5-7 Mohs · chalcedony · rootGrey agate boiled in sugar and acid until it turns black, a treatment Pliny already knew about, which makes it one of the oldest continuous…
• 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 …
• Botswana Agate6.5-7 Mohs · chalcedony · crown, sacralGrey and dusty-pink banded agate from the Bobonong district, famous for band-per-millimetre fineness that makes cut slabs look like topogra…
• 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…
• 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…
• Kunzite6.5-7 Mohs · silicate · heartPink spodumene, identified in 1902 and named for Tiffany's gemmologist George Frederick Kunz, who found it in the pegmatites of San Diego C…
• Larimar4.5-5 Mohs · silicate · throat, heartBlue pectolite from a single volcanic outcrop in Barahona Province, Dominican Republic, one mountainside, one country, no substitutes. It w…
• Lepidolite2.5-3 Mohs · silicate · heart, third-eye, crownA lithium-bearing mica in lavender flakes, mined chiefly as a lithium ore and sold as a calming stone on the strength of that chemistry. Th…
• Morganite7.5-8 Mohs · silicate · heartPink beryl, named in 1911 for J.P. Morgan, who was buying minerals at a scale that got things named after him. Manganese does the colouring…
• 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…
• 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 …
• Phantom Quartz7 Mohs · quartz · third-eye, crownA crystal that stopped growing, got dusted with chlorite or iron, and then resumed, leaving its own younger outline sealed inside like a fo…
• 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 …
• Rhodochrosite3.5-4 Mohs · carbonate · heart, solar-plexusManganese carbonate, banded pink and white where it grew as stalactites in old Inca silver workings at Capillitas in Argentina, and blood-r…
• Rhodonite5.5-6.5 Mohs · silicate · heart, rootA manganese silicate that runs pink until oxidation writes black through it, which is most of its aesthetic and all of its symbolism. The U…
• Rose Quartz7 Mohs · quartz · heartPink from vanishingly small fibres of a dumortierite-like mineral suspended in the quartz, the colour is a structural accident, not a dye. …
• Ruby in Zoisite6-9 Mohs · rock (aggregate) · heart, rootRuby crystals grown inside green zoisite, found in 1949 in the Longido district of Tanzania and named anyolite from the Maasai word for gre…
• Seraphinite2-2.5 Mohs · silicate · heart, crownA compact chlorite from the Korshunovskoye iron skarn in Irkutsk Oblast, marketed since the 1990s under a name taken from the seraphim beca…
• 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…
• Sugilite5.5-6.5 Mohs · silicate · third-eye, crownFirst described from Japan in 1944 as a drab yellow-brown mineral, then found in gem-quality purple at the Wessels manganese mine in South …
• 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…
• Unakite6-7 Mohs · rock (aggregate) · heart, third-eyeGranite that got hydrothermally cooked until its feldspar went salmon-pink and epidote grew through it in pistachio patches, named for the …
• Watermelon Tourmaline7-7.5 Mohs · silicate · heartA single elbaite crystal that changed its chemistry mid-growth, ending up pink inside and green outside, slice it and you get the fruit. Br…

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