Crystals for love

You want to feel soft toward yourself first, then toward someone else.

This book lists 38 crystals tied to love, from Amazonite to Watermelon Tourmaline. The ones people reach for first. They run A to Z, not best to worst, because nobody measures that. Every entry says what the mineral really is, how to tell a real one from a dyed or baked copy, and what each of the twelve signs is told about it.

• Amazonite6-6.5 Mohs · feldspar · heart, throatAmazonite grew in cooling granite, in the last pockets of melt to harden. The green comes from a trace of lead locked in it. Nobody dyed…
• 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…
• Cherry Quartz5-6 Mohs · man-made · heart, sacralSomebody melted silica in a factory, stirred in gold or copper for the red, and pulled the whole thing into a rod. The white swirls are…
• CChrome Diopside5.5 to 6 Mohs · pyroxene · heartMost of this mineral never gets anywhere near the surface. Diopside belongs to the dense rock under the crust, and it stays there. The…
• 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…
• Chrysoprase6-7 Mohs · chalcedony · heartChrysoprase lives through almost anything except a sunny sill. Strong light pulls the apple green out of it, and it does not come back…
• 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…
• 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…
• Emerald7.5-8 Mohs · silicate · heartNearly every emerald you will ever see has oil pressed into its cracks. Cedarwood oil usually, worked into the fissures until they stop…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• Kunzite6.5-7 Mohs · silicate · heartLight takes the colour out of it. Leave kunzite on a bright sill and the pink drains away, quite fast, and it never comes back. It grew…
• Larimar4.5-5 Mohs · silicate · throat, heartSunlight takes the blue out of it, slowly and for good. Salt and long soaking dull it too. It filled gas bubbles in volcanic rock in one…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• Morganite7.5-8 Mohs · silicate · heartAlmost every morganite in a case went into an oven at about four hundred degrees. The heat pulls the yellow out and leaves a cleaner…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• Peridot6.5-7 Mohs · silicate · heart, solar-plexusPeridot is olivine. It is one of the main minerals of the mantle, the hot layer under the crust, and it rode up here inside magma. So…
• PPink Tourmaline7 to 7.5 Mohs · tourmaline · heartPink tourmaline grows in pegmatite, the last wet pocket of a granite as it cools and gives up whatever the rest of the rock would not…
• Prasiolite7 Mohs · quartz · heartNearly every green quartz sold as green amethyst was purple amethyst until somebody put it in an oven at around 500 degrees. The iron in…
• 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…
• Rhodochrosite3.5-4 Mohs · carbonate · heart, solar-plexusThe pink and white bands are not a pattern anybody chose. Water carrying manganese ran through the same opening for a very long time…
• Rhodonite5.5-6.5 Mohs · silicate · heart, rootRhodonite began as manganese-rich mud on a seafloor. Heat and pressure buried it and cooked it pink over an age you cannot picture. The…
• Rose Quartz7 Mohs · quartz · heartRose quartz is plain quartz with microscopic pink fibres caught inside it. It grows in the coarse heart of granite. It is mined by the…
• RRuby9 Mohs · corundum · root, heartRuby is aluminium oxide that got contaminated. Corundum grows colourless. Then a few chromium atoms take the place of aluminium in the…
• Ruby in Zoisite6-9 Mohs · rock (aggregate) · heart, rootDeep underground, heat and pressure grew two things at once in one rock. Green zoisite. Red corundum, which is the mineral we call ruby…
• 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…
• SStrawberry Quartz (Glass)5-6 Mohs · man-made · heartThis is glass. It was melted in a factory, mostly in China, with copper stirred through it. The red threads are real metal flakes. They…
• Sugilite5.5-6.5 Mohs · silicate · third-eye, crownSugilite grew slowly in rock deep underground. Nearly every purple piece in the world came out of one South African mine. There is not…
• 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…
• SSynthetic Opal4.5-6.5 Mohs · man-made · crown, heartSomebody built this on purpose. Spheres finer than dust were settled into stacked layers and pressed solid. It is real opal, grown in a…
• Unakite6-7 Mohs · rock (aggregate) · heart, third-eyeUnakite was granite. Hot water got into it and took it apart from the inside. It did not become rubble. The pink held, and green grew in…
• Watermelon Tourmaline7-7.5 Mohs · silicate · heartHold a slice to the light. Pink in the middle, green around the outside, one crystal. It changed colour partway through growing. The…

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