The Crystal Encyclopedia
Every stone, in one place. What it means, what the tradition says it does, its chakra, element and planet, where it comes out of the ground, and whether it survives water. No account, no email, no paywall.
We tell you the beliefs and we tell you the facts, and we always make clear which is which. No stone treats an illness, and we will never say one does.
Reach for it to: calm a loud mind.
Said to help with
True: Its name comes from the Greek amethystos, meaning not intoxicated. Greeks and Romans carved wine cups from it believing it kept them sober.
Full Amethyst guide
Reach for it to: be kinder to yourself.
Said to help with
True: Rose quartz beads have been found in Mesopotamian sites thousands of years old — people were giving this stone to each other before writing was common.
Full Rose Quartz guide
Reach for it to: strengthen any intention.
Said to help with
True: Quartz is genuinely piezoelectric — cut precisely, it vibrates so steadily it keeps time in your watch. That is real physics, and it is not evidence for healing: the frequency is chosen by an engineer.
Full Clear Quartz guide
Reach for it to: back yourself out loud.
Said to help with
True: Almost all citrine sold is heat-treated amethyst — heat purple quartz and it turns gold. Same mineral throughout, so not a fake, but it should be disclosed and rarely is.
Full Citrine guide
Reach for it to: hold a line.
Said to help with
True: It develops a small electric charge when heated or squeezed. Dutch traders in the 1700s watched it pull ash out of their pipes and nicknamed it the ash-puller. It does NOT block EMF or wifi — that claim is marketing.
Full Black Tourmaline guide
Reach for it to: clear the air.
Said to help with
Dissolves in water. This is the stone people destroy most, usually while trying to cleanse it. Dry methods only.
True: Named after Selene, the Greek moon goddess. The Cave of the Crystals at Naica in Mexico holds selenite beams over eleven metres long — so hot and humid inside that people survive only minutes.
Full Selenite guide
Reach for it to: face what you avoid.
Said to help with
Raw edges are genuinely sharp. It is glass.
True: It is not a crystal at all — it is volcanic glass, cooled too fast for atoms to line up. A knapped obsidian edge can be a few molecules thick, finer than a surgical scalpel.
Full Obsidian guide
Reach for it to: trust the change.
Said to help with
True: Inuit tradition holds that the northern lights were trapped in the rocks of the Labrador coast until a man freed them with his spear — and what stayed behind is labradorite.
Full Labradorite guide
Reach for it to: start again.
Said to help with
True: Romans believed it was moonlight made solid. Hindu tradition ties it to the moon and to Mondays. Cultures that never met each other looked at this stone and independently said moon.
Full Moonstone guide
Reach for it to: hold your nerve.
Said to help with
Safe to own and wear. Never grind or sand it dry — the mineral it grew from is blue asbestos, and dust is the only hazard.
True: It began as a completely different mineral. Silica-rich water slowly replaced its fibres with quartz but kept their arrangement, and iron rusting during the process turned the blue to gold.
Full Tiger's Eye guide
Reach for it to: look at it honestly.
Said to help with
Never drink water it has touched, and never grind or sand it. Copper leaches into water. A polished piece on a shelf is entirely safe.
True: Those bands are time — each ring is a separate pulse of mineral-rich water over thousands of years. It was mined in Egypt over six thousand years ago and ground into the green eye paint on tomb paintings.
Full Malachite guide
Reach for it to: say the thing.
Said to help with
True: Ground into paint it becomes ultramarine, which for centuries cost more than gold by weight because it came from one Afghan valley. That is why Renaissance painters saved it for the Virgin's robe.
Full Lapis Lazuli guide
Reach for it to: come back down to earth.
Said to help with
True: Its smoky colour comes from natural radiation acting on aluminium traces in the quartz. It is the national gem of Scotland, where it is called cairngorm.
Full Smoky Quartz guide
Reach for it to: get started.
Said to help with
True: Napoleon wore a carnelian seal he picked up in Egypt. It was one of the most popular stones of the ancient world for signet rings, because hot wax does not stick to it.
Full Carnelian guide
Reach for it to: say it kindly.
Said to help with
True: It is named after the Amazon river, which is a mistake — no amazonite has ever been found there. The name stuck anyway.
Full Amazonite guide
Reach for it to: take the chance.
Said to help with
True: Its sparkle is called aventurescence, and it comes from tiny flakes of fuchsite mica inside the stone catching light. The word comes from Italian a ventura, by chance, after a glass-maker spilled copper filings into a batch by accident.
Full Green Aventurine guide
Reach for it to: think straight.
Said to help with
Soft and cleaves easily. Keep it out of water and away from harder stones.
True: Fluorite is where the word fluorescent comes from — it was the first material observed glowing under ultraviolet light, and the phenomenon was named after it. Many pieces still glow blue under UV.
Full Fluorite guide
Reach for it to: think it through.
Said to help with
True: It is often sold as lapis lazuli, but it is a different mineral and much cheaper. The tell is the flecks: lapis has gold pyrite, sodalite has white calcite and never gold.
Full Sodalite guide
Reach for it to: cool down.
Said to help with
Soft and porous. It absorbs water and dye. Keep it dry.
True: Most blue howlite is dyed — it is porous and takes dye beautifully, which is why it is the most common fake turquoise on the market. If cheap turquoise scratches with a pin, it is probably howlite.
Full Howlite guide
Reach for it to: invite good fortune.
Said to help with
True: Jade is two different minerals: jadeite and nephrite. Nephrite is the toughest natural stone on earth for resisting breakage — tougher than steel by that measure — which is why Neolithic peoples made axes from it.
Full Jade guide
Reach for it to: travel safely.
Said to help with
Porous. Water, oils, perfume and sunlight all alter it. Keep it dry and shaded.
True: Turquoise is porous enough to absorb oils from your skin and slowly change colour over years of wearing. That is not damage; many people consider it the stone taking on its owner. Its name comes from the French for Turkish, because it reached Europe via Turkey.
Full Turquoise guide
Reach for it to: steady yourself.
Said to help with
It is iron. Water rusts it. Keep it dry.
True: Hematite is iron ore, and its name comes from the Greek for blood — grind it and the powder is deep red, not grey. Mars looks red because it is covered in it.
Full Hematite guide
Reach for it to: back yourself.
Said to help with
It oxidises. Moisture rusts it and it can break down and weep sulfuric acid. Keep it dry.
True: Pyrite forms natural cubes so perfect they look machined, because of how its atoms stack. Its name is from the Greek for fire — strike it and it sparks, which is how it lit fires and fired early flintlock guns.
Full Pyrite guide
Reach for it to: breathe out.
Said to help with
True: It is the same mineral as emerald: beryl. Iron makes it blue, chromium makes it green. Sailors carried it as a talisman against drowning, which is where its name comes from — sea water.
Full Aquamarine guide
Reach for it to: want it out loud.
Said to help with
True: Its name comes from the Latin for pomegranate, because a garnet-bearing rock looks exactly like seeds in the flesh. Bohemian garnet jewellery was a Victorian obsession.
Full Garnet guide
Reach for it to: let it go.
Said to help with
True: Peridot arrives on earth two ways: from volcanoes, and inside meteorites. Some peridot in collections is genuinely extraterrestrial. Egypt mined it on Zabargad island 3,500 years ago and called it the gem of the sun.
Full Peridot guide
Reach for it to: feel it all.
Said to help with
Fragile and water-bearing. Sudden heat or very dry air makes it craze — fine cracks that cannot be undone.
True: Opal is up to 20 percent water, held in microscopic silica spheres. The rainbow fire is light bending between those spheres. Australia produces most of the world's opal, much of it from underground towns like Coober Pedy where people live in the mines to escape the heat.
Full Opal guide
Reach for it to: get through it.
Said to help with
True: Most black onyx sold is agate that has been dyed black, a practice going back to Roman times and considered legitimate in the trade. True naturally solid-black onyx is uncommon.
Full Onyx guide
Reach for it to: keep going.
Said to help with
True: Jasper was one of the most used stones of the ancient world — Egyptian amulets, Roman seals, Assyrian cylinders. It appears in the Bible more than once. It is common, which is exactly why everybody had one.
Full Red Jasper guide
Reach for it to: soften it.
Said to help with
True: Nearly all of it comes from a single deposit at Ysterputs in Namibia. Unlike most agates on the market, blue lace agate is not dyed — that colour is real.
Full Blue Lace Agate guide
Reach for it to: forgive it.
Said to help with
True: The black veins running through it are manganese oxide. Russia's Ural mines produced enormous pieces — a rhodonite sarcophagus weighing seven tonnes was carved for Tsarina Maria Alexandrovna.
Full Rhodonite guide
Reach for it to: be gentle with yourself.
Said to help with
Soft and reacts to acids. Keep it out of water.
True: It is the national gemstone of Argentina, where Inca silver mines left behind stalactites of it — sliced across, they show rings like a tree. Colorado named it the state mineral for the Sweet Home Mine's red crystals.
Full Rhodochrosite guide
Reach for it to: warm up.
Said to help with
True: Oregon sunstone contains actual copper — microscopic plates of it that catch light and give the glitter. It is the Oregon state gem, and one of the very few gems coloured by copper.
Full Sunstone guide
Reach for it to: get straight.
Said to help with
Splits easily along the blade. Handle gently and keep it out of long soaks.
True: Kyanite has two different hardnesses in the same crystal depending on which direction you scratch it — about 4.5 along the blade and 7 across it. Mineralogists once called it disthene, meaning two strengths.
Full Kyanite guide
Reach for it to: want something again.
Said to help with
Soft. Keep it out of water and away from acids.
True: Your teeth and bones are made of apatite — the same mineral family. Its name comes from the Greek for deceit, because it looks like so many other gems that miners kept misidentifying it.
Full Apatite guide
Reach for it to: be still.
Said to help with
Very soft and fragile, and it fades. Keep it dry and out of the sun.
True: Celestite gets its name from the Latin for heavenly, for its colour. The largest known geode on earth is celestite — a cave in Ohio, lined with crystals up to a metre long, that you can stand inside.
Full Celestite guide
Reach for it to: be held.
Said to help with
Never put it in water. It reverts to gypsum and is destroyed.
True: Angelite is compressed celestite, and it is only found in Peru. Put it in water and it slowly reverts to gypsum — the same mineral as selenite. It is quite literally a stone that dissolves back into a softer one.
Full Angelite guide
Reach for it to: put it down.
Said to help with
True: It was the first mineral ever named after a person — Colonel Hendrik von Prehn, who brought it back from the Cape of Good Hope in the 1780s. Before him, minerals were named for what they looked like.
Full Prehnite guide
Reach for it to: even it out.
Said to help with
True: It is a rock rather than a mineral — green epidote and pink feldspar grown together — and it is named after the Unaka mountains in Appalachia where it was first found. Tennessee made it the state rock.
Full Unakite guide
Reach for it to: endure it.
Said to help with
True: Medieval Christians called it the martyr's stone and believed the red flecks were Christ's blood fallen on jasper at the crucifixion. The red is actually iron oxide.
Full Bloodstone guide
Reach for it to: speak with authority.
Said to help with
Soft, and it contains copper. Keep it out of water and never grind it.
True: Its name comes from the Greek for gold glue — ancient goldsmiths used it as a soldering flux. Like malachite, it is a copper mineral, and the two often grow together in the same rock.
Full Chrysocolla guide
Reach for it to: cool the fire.
Said to help with
Soft, and it genuinely fades. Keep it out of sun and heat.
True: Larimar exists in exactly one place on earth: a single square kilometre in the Dominican Republic. It was only discovered in 1974, when a local man and a Peace Corps volunteer traced the blue pebbles on a beach back up the river to their source.
Full Larimar guide
Reach for it to: accept the change.
Said to help with
True: Charoite comes from exactly one place: a remote area near the Chara river in Siberia. It was not known to science until the 1970s, and nothing quite like it has been found anywhere else.
Full Charoite guide
Reach for it to: shed the skin.
Said to help with
Some serpentine varieties are asbestos-family minerals. Finished, polished pieces are safe to hold. Never grind, sand or cut it.
True: Serpentine is a whole family of minerals, not one. Some varieties are the mineral chrysotile — white asbestos. Tumbled and polished serpentine on a shelf is safe, but this is the strongest possible reason never to grind or sand any stone dry.
Full Serpentine guide
Reach for it to: steady the wobble.
Said to help with
Very soft and flaky. Keep it out of water.
True: Lepidolite genuinely contains lithium — it is a commercial lithium ore. That fact gets stretched into claims about mood; holding a rock does not deliver lithium to you in any form your body can use. The stone is a reminder, not a medicine.
Full Lepidolite guide
Reach for it to: clear the noise.
Said to help with
Soft and sooty — it leaves black marks on hands and fabric. It does not shield you from EMF.
True: Shungite is nearly two billion years old and is genuinely unusual — it contains fullerenes, a form of carbon whose discovery won a Nobel Prize. It does NOT block EMF or 5G, and that claim is the single most oversold thing in the crystal trade.
Full Shungite guide
Reach for it to: brace for change.
Said to help with
Brittle glass, and the most faked stone on the market. Buy only with provenance.
True: Moldavite is real impact glass. About 15 million years ago a meteorite struck what is now Germany, and molten earth was thrown so far it rained down over Bohemia and froze mid-air. It exists nowhere else, supply is genuinely finite, and fakes are rampant — most cheap moldavite is bottle glass.
Full Moldavite guide
Reach for it to: hold two things.
Said to help with
True: Ametrine is amethyst and citrine in one crystal, formed where the earth heated part of the stone and not the rest. It comes essentially from a single mine in Bolivia, and it is the best proof there is that amethyst and citrine are the same mineral.
Full Ametrine guide
Reach for it to: let love in.
Said to help with
True: It is beryl, the same mineral as emerald and aquamarine, coloured pink by manganese. It was named in 1911 after J.P. Morgan, the banker, who was a serious gem collector.
Full Morganite guide
Reach for it to: see it differently.
Said to help with
It cleaves and chips more easily than its price suggests. Not an everyday ring stone.
True: Tanzanite is found in one place on earth: a small area near Mount Kilimanjaro, discovered in 1967. Geologists estimate the supply may be exhausted within decades. It is also pleochroic — it genuinely shows blue, violet and burgundy depending on the angle you view it from.
Full Tanzanite guideEverything listed under said to help with is what the tradition holds, recorded here because it is genuinely what people come to look up. It is not a claim about what a rock does to your body. There is no evidence that crystals heal illness or emit an energy, and when researchers compared real stones against identical fakes, people reported the same sensations from both.
What a stone honestly gives you is an object to hold, a ritual to repeat, and a reminder at four in the afternoon of something you decided at nine in the morning. People have used objects this way for as long as there have been people. It is real, it is useful, and it is not a substitute for a doctor.
In the tradition, each stone is associated with one of the body's seven energy centres — amethyst with the crown, rose quartz with the heart, lapis lazuli with the throat. These are traditional correspondences rather than measurable properties, and they are useful mainly as a way of organising intention.
Start from what you actually want rather than from the stone. If your mind is loud, amethyst. If you are being hard on yourself, rose quartz. If you need a boundary, black tourmaline. If you have to hold your nerve, tiger's eye. If you want one simple stone, clear quartz.
No stone treats an illness, and there is no evidence that crystals emit a healing energy — studies comparing real stones to fakes found people reported the same sensations from both. What the tradition calls a stone's power is best understood as an intention you attach to an object you can hold. That is genuinely useful, and it is not medicine.
Selenite dissolves because it is gypsum. Malachite leaches copper and must never be drunk. Pyrite rusts. The simple rule is that soft stones stay dry, while the quartz family — amethyst, rose quartz, citrine, clear quartz, tiger's eye — is fine. Sunlight is the bigger danger for those, because it fades them permanently.