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Where is Ametrine Produced?
Ametrine is rarely found in nature. Almost all of the world’s commercial ametrine production has been from the Anahi Mine in southeastern Bolivia. The mine has been operated by Minerales y Metales del Oriente S.R.L. since 1989. The Anahi Mine is in a dolomitic limestone of the Murcielago Group, a sequence of limestones up to 1500 feet…
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What is Ametrine?
Most people have never heard of ametrine and are very surprised to see purple and yellow in a single transparent gemstone. Ametrine is a rare gemstone with a finite supply that is produced in commercial quantities at only one mine in the world. It is a relative newcomer to the gemstone trade, being available in…
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Rose Quartz as “Color of the Year”
PANTONE®, the color company, really likes the pink color of rose quartz. They enjoy it so much and find it so useful that they named Rose Quartz as their “Color of the Year” for 2016. [6] It is nice to know that a company with a global reputation for its expertise on color has been…
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La Madona Rosa and The Van Allen Belt
Rose quartz is not one of the most commonly seen specimens in mineral collections because it rarely occurs in the well-formed crystals preferred by collectors. The exceptions have been a few spectacular specimens of pink quartz with well-formed crystals that have sold for very high prices. One specimen of note is “La Madona Rosa” (The…
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Sources, Treatments, and Synthetics
Rose quartz is found in abundance in many deposits throughout the world. Much of the rose quartz that is sold today is produced in Brazil, South Africa, India, and Madagascar. Other sources include Namibia, Mozambique, and Sri Lanka. In the United States, a deposit near Custer, South Dakota once produced significant amounts of rose quartz.…
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Color and Asterism in Rose Quartz
In the mineralogical literature, the pink color of rose quartz has been attributed to titanium, manganese, and iron by a large number of authors for over 100 years. Tiny needles of rutile have been given credit for forming the six-ray star of rose quartz for the same amount of time. In the late 1990s, an interesting investigation…
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Uses of Rose Quartz
Rose quartz is one of the most commonly encountered lapidary materials. It is abundant, usually inexpensive, and popular as tumbled stones, beads, and cabochons. These have the richest color when pieces are at least a centimeter in diameter or thickness because of the material’s weak color. With a hardness of 7 on the Mohs scale and…
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Physical Properties of Rose Quartz
The pink color of rose quartz ranges from a very light, almost imperceptible pink, to a rich translucent pink. It is usually cut into cabochons, beads, and faceted stones of about eight millimeters in size or larger to display the rich pink color. Some specimens of rose quartz contain a dense network of fine inclusions…
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What is Rose Quartz?
Rose quartz is the name used for pink specimens of the mineral quartz. It is abundant, common, and found in large quantities at numerous locations around the world. It is usually occurs as massive, anhedral occurrences in hydrothermal veins and pegmatites. The pink color of rose quartz is attributed to microscopic inclusions of a pink variety of the mineral dumortierite. These inclusions…
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Investing in Tanzanite?
Numerous sellers of tanzanite use the fact that tanzanite is only found in one small area to promote the material’s rarity. A counter to that is that the world is an enormous planet and zoisite is not an extremely rare mineral. How many people and companies are out looking for samples of zoisite and taking…