Last week we talked about rutilated and tourmalinated quartz, this week we have a little variety of funky quartz inclusions to take you through.
First on the list is dumortierite in quartz. Dumortierite is a fibrous material, commonly blue (it can often be found masquerading as sodalite or lapis lazuli). In quartz, it can be found in the form of short needle-like inclusions in various orientations. Close up you can see long striations down the length of the crystal, like tourmaline, but they are a pale to darker blue colour, and form part of the orthorhombic crystal system and opposed to the trigonal tourmaline.
The next *gem* we have to share is one of our favourites. It’s not just crystals that create beautiful inclusions, it is other forms of minerals too. Iron oxide in particular. There are many different forms of iron oxide, but we’re not going to get too technical here. All we care about is the incredible saturation of red, orange and yellow found in the quartz, and the beautiful botryoidal-like patterns formed.
The last stone is really cool. In the trade this stone is called Super Seven Quartz, because it is home to seven super minerals: amethyst, rock crystal, smoky quartz, goethite, cacoxenite, rutile and lepidocrocite. The ratio of inclusions varies so much in these stones, so understandably they all look really different, but generally what you will find is purple/colourless colour zoning, red platy inclusions, reddish needle-like inclusions, and a few black bits here and there.
