Crystals for love

The crystals people reach for around love are Amazonite, Calcite (Coloured Varieties) and Cherry Quartz, 33 stones in all. the ones people reach for first. 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.

• Amazonite6-6.5 Mohs · feldspar · heart, throatGreen microcline, coloured by trace lead and structural water, and named after a river it has never actually been found in. The Pikes Peak …
• 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,…
• Cherry Quartz5-6 Mohs · man-made · heart, sacralColoured glass, marbled with white and cut into points and spheres, sold with a fruit name and a quartz claim. There is no natural material…
• Chrysocolla2.5-7 Mohs · silicate · throat, heartA hydrated copper silicate with no fixed hardness, ranging from chalk to gem depending on how much silica got into it. The Greeks named it …
• 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…
• Dalmatian Stone6-7 Mohs · rock (aggregate) · root, sacralNot a jasper and not tourmaline-spotted: a peralkaline microgranite from Chihuahua whose black flecks are arfvedsonite, an amphibole. The e…
• Emerald7.5-8 Mohs · silicate · heartBeryl coloured by chromium, and one of the four traditional precious stones, mined at Cleopatra's Egyptian workings, then in vast quantity …
• Garnet6.5-7.5 Mohs · silicate · root, sacralNot one mineral but a family of six-plus species sharing a cubic structure, ranging from the black-red almandine in every schist to the gre…
• Goldstone5-6 Mohs · man-made · sacral, solar-plexusSeventeenth-century Venetian glass in which metallic copper is crystallised out of the melt under controlled oxygen starvation, a genuinely…
• Green Aventurine6.5-7 Mohs · quartz · heartA quartzite glittering with chromium mica, mined chiefly in southern India and sold in more starter kits than almost anything else. The nam…
• 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…
• Magnesite3.5-4.5 Mohs · carbonate · crown, heartMagnesium carbonate, mostly an industrial refractory mineral, and the second great blank canvas of the crystal trade. Where howlite has bla…
• Mahogany Obsidian5-6 Mohs · volcanic glass · root, sacralObsidian stained red-brown by iron oxide, giving the least severe of the volcanic glasses, the swirls are a frozen record of how the lava w…
• Moonstone6-6.5 Mohs · feldspar · sacral, third-eye, crownPotassium feldspar that unmixed into microscopically thin alternating layers as it cooled, scattering light into a floating blue-white glow…
• 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…
• Moss Agate6.5-7 Mohs · chalcedony · heart, rootChalcedony that trapped mineral filaments as it formed, producing something that looks convincingly like vegetation and is entirely inorgan…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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 …
• 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…
• Synthetic Opal4.5-6.5 Mohs · man-made · crown, heartReal opal chemistry assembled by people, silica microspheres stacked into the same diffraction lattice nature builds, then consolidated, of…
• 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…

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