The Akra Gemstone Journal

The cloud that makes rose quartz milky is the same thing that gives it its pink, so the two cannot be separated. Three checks that work at home, two that can damage the stone, and why rose quartz is not pink quartz.

Uneven color is the first sign of real amethyst, and the tips are usually the darkest part. Four checks you can make at home, and why a crystal shows its color more openly than a cut stone.

Real jade is never one flat green. Seven checks for a stone that is already set in silver, from a studio that cuts and sets nephrite by hand.

Six tests you can do at home to tell real obsidian from glass, resin and dyed stone, and three popular tests that prove nothing at all.

Some moonstone glows and some does not, and both are moonstone. Here is what the glow actually is, what a raw unpolished stone gives you instead, and how to tell a real one from glass.

A stone that looks like gold, with flat square faces that gold never grows. Five checks that tell the two apart by eye, and why those faces stay as they grew.

The word toxic follows malachite everywhere. Here is what the sources actually say, where the real risk sits, how to tell a fake from a real stone, and why we stop before the polish.

Three minerals make one lapis, and only one of them is blue. Four checks that catch dyed stone, glass and plastic in seconds, and why a raw lapis face looks nothing like the polished one in every photograph.