Clear Crystals
Clear Quartz
Quartz Family
Clear quartz, also called rock crystal, is silicon dioxide in its purest, most transparent form — no significant trace elements, no color centers, just SiO2 grown slowly enough to form large, optically clean crystals. It's one of the most common minerals in Earth's crust (quartz makes up roughly 12% of it by volume), but genuinely flawless, well-terminated clear crystals are still cut for jewelry and display because clean growth over a large size is uncommon even though the raw material is everywhere.
Selenite
Gypsum Family
Selenite is the clear-to-white, fibrous or bladed variety of gypsum — calcium sulfate dihydrate — and it's the single softest crystal commonly sold in the crystal trade: at Mohs 2, it's soft enough to scratch with a fingernail, which is both its most distinctive identifying feature and the reason it needs genuinely different care than the quartz-family stones most people are used to. Its name comes from Selene, the Greek moon goddess, for its pale, softly glowing luster.
Moonstone
Feldspar Group
Moonstone is a variety of feldspar — specifically orthoclase or, in the finest material, adularia — and the soft, floating blue-white glow it's named for (called adularescence) isn't a surface coating or dye at all: it's an optical effect caused by light scattering off microscopically thin, alternating layers of two different feldspar minerals that separated inside the crystal as it cooled slowly underground, a process mineralogists call exsolution.
Rutilated Quartz
Quartz Family
Rutilated quartz is ordinary clear or smoky quartz with a genuinely striking flaw trapped inside it: fine, needle-like crystals of rutile (titanium dioxide) grown within the quartz as it formed, sometimes in dense golden starbursts and sometimes as isolated hair-like threads nicknamed 'Venus hair' or 'angel hair.' By classical faceted-gem standards this kind of inclusion would once have been considered a defect, and it's a largely modern taste — prized in today's crystal and jewelry trade specifically for the visual drama that would have counted against a stone in older grading systems.
Tourmalinated Quartz
Quartz Family
Tourmalinated quartz combines two minerals discussed elsewhere on this site — clear quartz and black tourmaline (schorl) — into one stone, with fine black tourmaline needles grown directly through a clear or lightly smoky quartz host, sometimes so densely that the black web nearly obscures the quartz around it. Where rutilated quartz traps golden titanium-dioxide needles, this variety traps the same iron-rich borosilicate mineral responsible for plain black tourmaline's color and grounding reputation, giving it a genuinely different chemistry from its rutile-bearing cousin despite the visually similar 'needles-in-quartz' look.
Danburite
Borosilicate
Danburite is named for Danbury, Connecticut, where it was first formally described in 1839 — the original American locality is now largely worked out, and today's fine material comes almost entirely from elsewhere in the world. It's a comparatively rare borosilicate that forms only where boron and calcium are both locally available in the right metamorphic or pegmatite setting, a specific enough combination that danburite deposits are far less common globally than more chemically flexible silicates like quartz or feldspar.
Golden Healer Quartz
Quartz Family
Golden healer quartz is ordinary clear quartz colored by iron oxide staining rather than the trace-element-in-the-lattice chemistry that produces citrine's yellow — a genuinely different mechanism, since the iron here typically sits on the crystal's surface or along internal fractures rather than substituted into the silica structure itself. The 'golden healer' name itself is a contemporary crystal-trade term rather than one with older mineralogical roots, worth being upfront about given how many stones on this site carry documented history stretching back centuries or millennia.
Angel Aura Quartz
Quartz Family (Treated)
Angel aura quartz starts as ordinary natural clear quartz and then undergoes an entirely artificial process: a lab bonds a microscopically thin layer of vaporized platinum and/or silver onto the crystal's surface under high heat and vacuum, producing a pale, silvery-white iridescent sheen. This is 100% a disclosed lab treatment, not a natural mineral color or variety — a distinction worth being upfront about, since the base clear quartz is genuinely natural even though the finished iridescent surface is entirely man-made.
Apophyllite
Zeolite-Associated Minerals
Apophyllite gets its name from the Greek apophylliso, "to leaf off," because early mineralogists noticed it tends to flake apart along flat planes when heated — a genuinely distinctive behavior tied to its water content. It's most often seen as glassy, pyramid-terminated colorless-to-green crystals growing in clusters, frequently alongside zeolite minerals in cavities left behind by ancient volcanic activity.
Elestial Quartz
Quartz Family
Elestial quartz describes a distinctive crystal habit rather than a separate mineral species — it's ordinary quartz (often smoky quartz specifically) showing a complex, layered arrangement of small terminated faces stacked over the main crystal's surface, giving it a skeletal, almost fractal-looking appearance that's genuinely unusual even among crystal collectors used to seeing quartz in its more common single-point form.
Girasol Quartz
Quartz Family
Girasol quartz is a milky, translucent quartz variety showing a soft, glowing blue sheen when light passes through it — a genuine optical effect (related to but distinct from opalescence) caused by microscopic internal structure, giving the stone a gently luminous, moon-like quality that's led to some overlap and confusion with actual moonstone in casual marketing.
Halite
Salt Minerals
Halite is, quite simply, the mineral form of ordinary table salt — the same sodium chloride chemistry, just grown as natural crystals rather than produced industrially. Pink halite specifically, most famously associated with Pakistan's Khewra salt mine, gets its color from a genuinely different source than most colored minerals on this site, and its extreme water solubility is the single most important physical property to know before handling it.
Herkimer Diamond
Quartz Family
Despite the name, Herkimer diamonds have nothing to do with actual diamond — they're a specific variety of clear quartz found only in dolomite rock deposits around Herkimer County, New York, prized for an unusually high natural clarity and a distinctive double-terminated habit, meaning the crystal grows pointed at both ends without needing to be cut, a genuinely uncommon growth pattern for quartz.
Lemurian Seed Quartz
Quartz Family
Lemurian seed quartz is a trade name for clear-to-milky quartz crystals showing a distinctive pattern of fine, regularly spaced horizontal striations running around the crystal — the name references Lemuria, a hypothetical lost continent proposed in 19th-century pseudo-scientific writing and later adopted into various New Age traditions, though the striation pattern itself is a genuine, observable mineralogical feature regardless of the name's mythological origin.
Muscovite
Mica Group Minerals
Muscovite is the most common mica mineral, forming thin, flexible, transparent sheets that were historically used as a genuine substitute for window glass in Russia — the name comes directly from "Muscovy glass," referencing the country where this practical use was widespread before modern glass manufacturing became affordable.
Zircon
Silicates
Zircon holds a genuinely remarkable scientific record: crystals from the Jack Hills region of Western Australia have been radiometrically dated to roughly 4.4 billion years old, making zircon the oldest known material of terrestrial origin on Earth — older than any rock, and only a few hundred million years younger than the planet itself.
Milky Quartz
Quartz Family
Milky quartz is the cloudy, opaque-to-translucent white variety of quartz that was, for most of the mineral trade's history, considered the unremarkable leftover material separated out from clearer, more prized quartz — it's only become popular in its own right fairly recently, as an inexpensive, widely available beginner stone, and it's worth being clear that its softness reputation is often mixed up with selenite's in casual crystal-shop marketing, when the two are physically nothing alike.
Phenakite
Silicate (Beryllium Silicate)
Phenakite shares its name's origin story with sphalerite in an oddly parallel way: it comes from the Greek 'phenakos,' meaning deceiver, because colorless phenakite crystals were repeatedly mistaken for quartz or even diamond by early mineralogists before being properly identified as a distinct beryllium silicate — a rare gem mineral genuinely easy to overlook given how convincingly it can mimic more familiar clear stones.
Scolecite
Silicate (Zeolite Group)
Scolecite belongs to the zeolite mineral family and forms in delicate, radiating sprays of fine white or colorless needle-like crystals — a genuinely fragile, distinctive habit that also gave the mineral its name, since heating or blowing on a specimen with a blowpipe causes it to curl and writhe like a worm as its structural water is driven off.
Natrolite
Silicate (Zeolite Group)
Natrolite rounds out the trio of zeolite minerals covered on this site alongside scolecite and stilbite, distinguished by its own slender, prismatic crystal habit and, in specimens from a particular Canadian locality, a genuine and rather striking orange fluorescence under ultraviolet light.
A mineral is naturally clear, or colorless, when its crystal structure contains no trace elements or lattice defects capable of absorbing any part of the visible light spectrum — all wavelengths pass through more or less equally, which the eye interprets as the absence of color rather than as any particular hue.
Clear quartz is the benchmark case: pure silicon dioxide, with silicon and oxygen atoms bonded in a repeating lattice that, in its ideal chemical form, contains nothing to selectively absorb visible light. Every colored quartz variety on this site — amethyst, citrine, smoky quartz, rose quartz — starts from this same base structure and picks up color only once a trace element or irradiation-induced defect gets introduced; clear quartz is, in that sense, the "default" state the other varieties deviate from.
Herkimer "diamonds," a clear quartz variety from Herkimer County, New York, are prized specifically for combining that natural colorlessness with an unusually high degree of natural clarity and a double-terminated crystal habit — genuinely different from cut, faceted diamond in chemistry, but visually similar enough in brilliance that the nickname, though technically inaccurate, has stuck for well over a century.
Danburite, a considerably rarer clear stone than quartz, is a calcium borosilicate rather than a silica mineral — its clarity comes from the same basic principle (an unobstructed crystal lattice with no significant light-absorbing impurities), but the underlying chemistry is entirely unrelated to quartz, worth knowing since the two are sometimes casually grouped together as "clear crystals" despite being chemically distinct mineral species.
Selenite, a variety of the mineral gypsum, achieves its own near-clear-to-milky-white appearance through yet another distinct chemistry — it's a hydrous calcium sulfate, and its characteristic softness (Mohs 2, soft enough to scratch with a fingernail) sets it apart sharply from the much harder clear quartz and danburite, a genuinely different physical experience despite superficially similar coloring.
Clear stones are, somewhat counterintuitively, some of the most chemically diverse entries on this whole color-browsing page precisely because "lacking color" doesn't require any particular chemistry — it only requires the absence of a light-absorbing mechanism, which several unrelated mineral families each achieve in their own way.
Buyers should also be aware that completely flawless, perfectly clear specimens of any mineral are comparatively uncommon in nature — most natural clear quartz shows at least some internal inclusions or fracturing under magnification, and exceptionally clean, large clear crystals (like fine Herkimer material) command a real premium specifically because true optical perfection is genuinely rare in geological material.
Crystal properties described here come from metaphysical tradition and are for wellbeing inspiration and entertainment — not medical advice. See our full disclaimer.