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“Locality confirmed” sounds like a small detail on a specimen label, but for a serious collector it can be the

Most faceted gemstones get their sparkle from dozens of flat, precisely angled surfaces. A cabochon takes the opposite approach entirely,

In the year 2000, miners working roughly 1,000 feet below Naica, Mexico, broke into a cavity and found selenite crystals

Long before mica specimens were sold for their sparkle, the mineral had a much less decorative career: as the standard

Quartz’s industrial importance has almost nothing to do with jewelry or display specimens, and nearly everything to do with two

A lab-grown emerald and a natural one can share identical chemistry, identical crystal structure, and be genuinely difficult to tell

“Rockhound” sounds like it should be an old word, something with roots stretching back to nineteenth-century prospecting. It’s actually a

Every February, a city of about half a million people in the Arizona desert becomes, briefly, the center of the

Some elements show up in hundreds of different minerals. Others barely form minerals of their own at all, despite being

New Jersey’s famous trap-rock mineral finds, the stilbite, prehnite, and datolite that made Paterson-area quarries legendary among collectors, all come