Hey, does anybody want to see some more of my cool rocks?
This one looks like a painting, doesn’t it? This Cool Rock is polychrome jasper. When I look at this rock, I feel like I’m standing at the bottom of a canyon in the desert, staring up at the blue sky.
That flaky texture, cranberry color, and pearlescent shine make lepidolite look like a sugarcoated dessert. Here’s something cool about lepidolite: its crystals are a little bit elastic, so they can bend without breaking, and they’ll snap back into shape when you let go! (I’ve gotta stop peeling crystals off of my specimen to play with them, or eventually I won’t have any lepidolite left…)
These little blue cubes are fluorite, which is my state mineral! Fluorite comes in so many different colors, I hope to have a collection of lots of them someday.
Wanna see some BIG CUBES? Check it out: the Most Beautiful Pyrite in the World.
This Cool Rock is called Puddingstone, and it deserves more love. It’s a conglomerate of pebbles that can be anything from jasper to granite, mixed together in a silica matrix to create these cool spots! My puddingstone has a really pretty peachy-pink matrix, with a lot of different colors inside it!
I think my last Cool Rocks post gave the impression that I don’t like amethyst, which couldn’t be further from the truth. Look at this slice of amethyst stalactite! This rock is one of my absolute favorites. That green core is made of agate, and makes the whole thing look like a flower that got suddenly turned to crystal.
Here’s another flower: a Desert Rose! This huge red rose is made of barite, but selenite can form little white roses too. Maybe I should get this barite a selenite friend?
What’s hiding inside this ordinary rock? It’s a bunch of tiny spheres of wavellite! Hi little guys! You’re looking very green today.
Slipping in an edit here: initially I had ID’d this one as turgite, but after a little more research I’m not sure that’s the case. This little handful of rainbows and glitter is just a particularly iridescent piece of hematite! How cool is it that even regular hematite can be so colorful?
What’s so special about this boring old rock, I ask, rhetorically, having never been so wrong about anything ever. This is ulexite, also known as TV rock! Take a look at what it can do.
It’s hard to capture the full effect in a photo, but we’re not just seeing through a clear piece of rock. Ulexite’s crystal structure is a natural fiber optics cable. Any image at the back surface of the rock gets projected onto the front! Science!!
This is prehnite, and there’s not much to say about its loveliness that you can’t see for yourself. A translucent green beauty.
This is the most valuable rock I own! I saved up for a long time to buy the specimen I had my eye on, always worried it would be sold before I could afford it. Lo and behold, here it is! Rutilated quartz!!! It’s an ordinary colorless quartz crystal, with amazing hair-thin veins of golden rutile shooting through it and sparkling.
But wait, there’s one more Cool Rock I must show you.
…And it’s not really a rock at all. Elegant element 83, a strange and spiraling eldritch beauty, an alien-looking crystal of pure metal, rainbow and mildly radioactive… You know her name; it’s Bismuth!
Weird and wonderful bismuth! Colorful, coiling bismuth! What a wonderful crystal to see! Metallic, magical, magnificent bismuth! What a wonderful crystal to be!
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