Natural Phantom Quartz crystal point. Turning this piece you notice different shapes and colors appearing. It is due to the minerals that are attached to the crystal and the faces of the crystal reflect and magnify the minerals.
Size: 3" x 1 1/2" x 1 1/4"
Phantom quartz has crystals with shadows or “phantoms" from different impurities that have accumulated in the end of a quartz crystal during its growth.
If minerals precipitate several times during growth, one can see several stacked phantoms, the phantom is often faint and ghost-like, as you turn the specimen side to side the phantom usually becomes invisible.
Red and brown shadows come from iron minerals, white from trapped gases, blue from riebeckite and green from chlorite to name a few.
Rutilated Quartz is a transparent Quartz with Rutile inclusions that are in fact hairlike mineral growths. The Rutile inclusions range from thin, sparse, and parallel, to thick, dense, and crisscrossed, and everything in-between. Each Rutilated Quartz gemstone is unique in its pattern of Rutile inclusions.
Rutile has a metallic-adamantine luster, and can be reddish brown, gold, yellowish, silver, black, bluish, or violet. Rutile derives its name from the Latin rutilus, red, in reference to the deep red color observed in some specimens. Small rutile needles present in gems are responsible for "star" sapphires, "star" rubies and other "star" gems, an optical phenomenon known as asterism.
