Crystals for speaking up

The crystals people reach for around speaking up are Amazonite, Ametrine and Angelite, 26 stones in all. for what you didn't say. 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 …
• 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…
• 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…
• Aquamarine7.5-8 Mohs · silicate · throat, heartBlue beryl, the same species as emerald with iron instead of chromium, and the traditional talisman of sailors, the Romans considered it Ne…
• Aura Quartz7 Mohs · quartz · crown, third-eye, throatOrdinary quartz run through a vacuum chamber and fused with vaporised metal, a 1980s lapidary trick that produced the most photogenic objec…
• Azurite3.5-4 Mohs · carbonate · third-eye, throatThe blue copper carbonate, ground for centuries into the pigment that turned green in Renaissance paintings because azurite slowly becomes …
• 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, …
• Blue Kyanite4.5-7 Mohs · silicate · throat, third-eyeAn aluminium silicate that forms only at high pressure deep in the crust, so its presence in a rock tells a geologist how far down it has b…
• Blue Lace Agate6.5-7 Mohs · chalcedony · throatChalcedony banded in pale blue and white, essentially all of it from one region of Namibia, which is why the supply is finite and the price…
• 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…
• 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 …
• 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…
• Herkimer Diamond7 Mohs · quartz · third-eye, crownNot diamonds, exceptionally clear double-terminated quartz that grew free-floating in 500-million-year-old dolostone pockets in upstate New…
• Howlite3.5 Mohs · silicate · crown, third-eyeA calcium borosilicate from Nova Scotia that would be an obscure collector's mineral if it were not the perfect blank canvas, porous, white…
• Iolite7-7.5 Mohs · silicate · third-eye, throatCordierite, transparent and violet-blue, and famous for a story that may well be true: thin slices act as a polarising filter, and there is…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• Opalite5.5-6 Mohs · man-made · crown, third-eyeGlass. Not opal, not moonstone, not a mineral of any kind, an opalescent art glass produced in quantity and sold under a name engineered to…
• Optical Calcite3 Mohs · carbonate · crown, third-eyeClear calcite that splits light into two rays, so text read through it appears twice, the mineral that let nineteenth-century physicists pr…
• Sardonyx6.5-7 Mohs · chalcedony · root, sacralStraight-layered agate in red-brown and white, and the standard material for Roman cameos and signet stones because the layers can be under…
• 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…
• Sodalite5.5-6 Mohs · silicate · throat, third-eyeA feldspathoid, mined in quantity in Ontario after a 1901 find was used to decorate Marlborough House for Princess Margaret of Connaught, h…
• Tanzanite6-7 Mohs · silicate · third-eye, crown, throatFound in 1967 in a strip of ground about seven kilometres long in the Merelani Hills of Tanzania, and nowhere else on earth. Tiffany rename…
• 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…

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