White labradorite
Designation for white feldspar with especially multi-colored (rainbow) ‘flash’. Initially this name was used particularly in the gemology and gemstone trade for moonstone with more…
Category: Gem or Scam? Library
Spirit quartz
Trade name for cactus quartz from South Africa. This is a specific growth form of quartz in which the main crystals are surrounded by a…
Tangawaite / Tangiwaite
Synonym/commercial name for the mineral bowenite, a translucent, fine-grained variety of serpentine antigorite similar to nephrite. A dark green variety is used by the Maoris…
Smelt / melting quartz
Misleading commercial name for colored glass, with possible infusion of colored mineral dust. Sometimes sellers indicate with glass that it is fused quartz in order…
Spectrolite
Name for a variety of labradorite with strong labradorescence due to very fine exsolution of alkali feldspar. The name spectrolite was once coined as a…
Tianhe Stone
Commercial name for amazonite from Tianhe, China. Recently offered through the major online platforms. Incidentally, there seems to be quite a bit of difference in…
Tanganyika (artstone)
Unregistered commercial name for an ornamental stone better known as anyolite or “ruby in zoisite“. It is actually a metamorphic rock composed of green chromium…
Tiffany Stone
Commercial name for a fine-grained purple to light purple variety of fluorite from Utah, United States. Usually with round patterns and sometimes with small impurities…
White moldavite
Misleading commercial name for low-quality white calcite found in the Mohave Desert in the southwestern United States, among other places. The typical etched structure of…
Super Seven™
Registered trade name used for material purportedly containing the following combination of minerals: quartz, smoky quartz, rutile in quartz (rutilated quartz), amethyst, goethite, lepidocrocite and…
