Victoria Stone
Commercial name for an entirely man-made glassy material, mainly greenish-white in color with a cloud-like structure. This material is also called Chinese larimar or green…
Category: Gem or Scam? Library
Fire Azeztulite™
Unregistered commercial name for yet another new Azeztulite™ variant by Robert Simmons after he moved to New Zealand, cleverly capitalizing on the huge commercial success…
Thunder Egg (agate)
Mineralogical designation for a spherical- or geode-like structure, sometimes with a piece of parent rock (matrix) forming the outer zone of the thunder egg. This…
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…
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…
