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CrystalCircle β Rough Emeralds
#emerald #gem #mineral
Published: 2016-08-04 04:17:40 +0000 UTC; Views: 279; Favourites: 13; Downloads: 1
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Description
In case you ever wanted to know what an emerald looks like when pulled out of the dirt. These are NOT gem quality! Gem quality rough emeralds are shaped like this, but are the same shade of green through the entire crystal and the color is much brighter. The crystals are also clear as glass.ΒThese guys ARE emeralds though...they are useless for making jewelry, but still pretty in their own way. As you can see, the crystals are pale and opaque. These are not the qualities of a gem, but they do form near perfect hexagons. Emeralds only grow as hexagonal crystals! It's an unmistakable look of the gem besides it's color.
I bought a lot of four because that's just how big the lot is. I'm not keeping all of them, but I'm not selling them. I'm giving two of them away to some friends of mine who are also into rock collecting.
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Comments: 20
Those are my birth stones also I'm I big rock collector
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Cool!
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Technically speaking, these would look even uglier if you just pulled them out of the ground. These have been cleaned of course.
You can also tumble these into polished stones or beads, so they could be for semiprecious jewelry, but yeah they'd be pretty ugly.
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Eh, I'm not really into polished stones. For some reason I like natural and raw stuff. Nature crafted them to be beautiful and I think polishing some stones takes away from that. Yeah these were cleaned, though crystals like this tend to form in AND outside of the matrix. So exposed crystals like these (and many others) are already pretty clean. They may need some dusting off, but that's pretty much it.Β
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Oh don't get me wrong; I highly prefer completely untampered specimens. I'm almost purist in that regard.
Not sure what you mean by inside and outside of matrix. To put it in context, these crystals were most likely all contained within matrix before they were extracted.
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With one of these stones, the emerald crystal grows into the matrix and out of the other side. Some crystals grow within the matrix instead of growing on top of it. I dig for gypsum crystals that form in a clay cliff near my house. You can take a chunk of the clay and dissolve it with hot water and the crystals are the only thing left behind. It's pretty cool! Emeralds tend to stick to the outside of the matrix, but some grow within the rock. These crystals are often low-quality because of all the rock inclusions they have in them. Like you said; these guys were probably all within the rock and dug up. It's why they are all cloudy and opaque rather than clear. Still neat little things though.Β
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Oh, I see what you mean. Well that's really context-dependent - when you say that some crystals are growing on top of the matrix and not "in" the matrix, that's simply because that's how the specimen was cleaned and presented. It probably was "in" the matrix and the top half was broken off. Beryls in general are often part of the mixture of minerals found within metamorphic rocks, and so they're often frozen amongst other minerals. I'd say a crystal would grow "on" a matrix if it grew on the surface of a cavity, which is less common. Sorry about being semantical though!
The inclusions in emeralds may be other minerals (wouldn't really be the host rock itself but perhaps minerals that comprise the host rock). Sometimes the lack of clarity is due to internal fracturing - a ton of it. But yeah, emeralds are especially known for having inclusions. A lack of inclusions for emeralds is very rare and that's what everyone desires.
The pieces you have here are likely from Brazil, and they typically have this style of appearance. Colombian ones...different story!
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I have quite a few emeralds like this, though smaller. I also have some ruby and quartz. And topaz. I COLLECT A LOT OF CRYSTALS.
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Oh nice! I have...too many to name XD My collection is in the hundreds of specimens. Some of my better pieces are rough rubies, a pink tourmaline, fluorite, selenite (a foot-long crystal of it), and I'm getting an 11 pound cluster ofΒ hexagonalΒ golden calcite with malachite and chalcopyrite. That will be the largest one on my collection besides a 300 pound fossil mortality plate...I should really get a picture of that thing. Lots of people call BS on that one XD
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My collection is approaching 1000 pieces...I'm trying to downsize, but selling isn't easy. :/
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I know that feeling. I'm trying to sell some of my stuff too. Mainly my gypsum. I have so much of it because I keep finding them LOL. Ebay is a really good place to sell. It's where I got these and all my recent specimens.Β
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I would use eBay if I had confidence I'd sell something. Because there's a listing fee for each auction you put up.
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Yeah I forgot about that 
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Etsy takes something like a 10-15% fee for each item you end up selling (and it may also charge for listing too, but I'm not sure). The only way you can really get rid of the middleman fee is Craigslist/Kijiji haha. Next closest thing to that would be selling on Facebook (a LOT of people do this) and Instagram. On those platforms, the only middleman fee would be Paypal. It sounds like you can get a lot of attention with Facebook selling groups.
And that's neat regarding the rating info on Etsy. I think if I sell stuff, I need to be extra considerate to pricing my stuff. Pricing minerals is a hard thing to do - it's so subjective and has little standardization.
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The only other place I can think of is StoreEnvy. It's free to make a store and list stuff, BUT you get pretty much zero traffic because the site puts it's "supporting stores" (people who pay the site to sell on it) first in all search queries. If you build up enough watchers on here or any other site, you can advertise it that way, but there's really no other way to get people to your store on there...the main reason mine fell apart
Etsy and Ebay have VERY good traffic because it organizes things better and bases search results on ratings and items that are selling the soonest.
If you don't know how to price your rocks, Ebay is probably your best bet because people bid on them rather than you having a set price for each item. Like you could start a quartz crystal for a dollar and if people like it, they can bid and the price will go up. I've seen things start from a penny and go well over a hundred dollars in the matter of days! It just depends on how much people want it...and if they get into a bidding war you can guarantee you'll get WAY more for the rock than it's probably worth. My parents sold a giant clam shell a while ago and it went from $300 max bid (which wasn't bad) to $760 in the last MINUTE because of a bidding war! It was pretty amazing to watch that go up!
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I also have a stash of pyrite somewhere!
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ooh pyrite is cool!
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OOH i also have some bismuth!
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Bismuth is awesome! We do have a bismuth crystal in the house, but it's technically not mine. My dad grew it and he has it in his workshop. It's very pretty!Β
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IKR! I need to post a picture.
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