Stores that sell minerals, crystals, semiprecious gems, fossils, colorful stones, and the like are interesting. I hadn’t been in one in years. But visiting one a few days ago yielded some mysteries.
They had big quartz crystals and clusters of crystals. The facets of the crystals were glossy and mostly free of steps but on inspection not quite flat. They seemed to have varying slight curvatures. Near the edges, especially, they had convexity perpendicular to the edges, indicating the edges were turned down. Reflections in these faces were wavy and distorted. This is unfamiliar and surprising and unlike quartz crystals I’d seen years ago, as if the facets were polished with handheld power tools of some kind. There were some other crystals (not quartz) with similar big facets. My first question: were these specimens genuine or doctored?
They had enormous geodes, mostly amethyst, that looked like this (P.S. - I thought this link was for a photo in the Wikipedia entry but it seems to be for the whole entry):
The walls of the geodes were thin and their exteriors were oddly uniform, and looked to me like they’d been surfaced with gray body putty with a hand tool. My second question: do big geodes really form like this and are they laying around in caves or underground with such tidy uniform exterior surfaces, not having to be chipped or cut out of their surroundings? (I guess they really form like this because the Wikipedia photo looks like it.)
There was almost no information about the many different things they sold, except for detailed descriptions of their health and wellness benefits such as “purification”, “empowerment”, connections to various chakras, relations to various astrological signs, and so forth. This kind of thing isn’t surprising at festivals, incense shops, head shops, and whatnot. But this place had so many items for sale, some of them so big, and some of them so expensive (into the low tens of thousands of dollars), that I found it surprising indeed. My third question: is the mineralogical retail world divided into nerd and woo contingents, and can you tell which a store is without visiting and studying them?
One final comment: places I visited years ago also sold lapidary equipment like tumblers, sanding wheels, sphere grinding machines, and mineral blanks epoxied to short dowels for making cabochons. There was none of that here. Maybe that’s a way of identifying the kind of store in advance.