How many crystals are in the world

I was surprised to find out how 12th-century poet Bertran de Born compared the teeth of a woman he described in a passage to crystal. Reading that passage makes me think of a woman with a set of bright grills. We expect him to say her face is like crystal, but there is something carnal about crystal teeth. The image helps us understand that poets were attune to the physical qualities of crystal and translated that into erotic desire. Understanding the history of how crystal was perceived by different people throughout human history informs why we are fascinated with this stone to this day.

Aside from its more obvious symbolism of faith and innocence, crystal was also a material for thinking about — and not merely representing — erotic love. This was probably because the stone itself has contradictory aesthetic qualities. Crystal is transparent but you need to put effort in order to see through it. It refracts light, but it can also emit light. People have always had this fascination with precious stones. But people latched on to crystals partly because they have these contradictory physical qualities: They are both dark and transparent.

You can see through them, but not really. That history helps explain the continuing contemporary obsession with crystals and how they are thought to have magical, healing effects and energy.

In the Middle Ages, people also thought that crystals would bring a spiritual presence. People had this hunger to have something physical that embodies faith and spirituality. Crystals, in a way, fulfill a spiritual need for some people. Some people go to church, some do yoga, and others collect and meditate with crystals. Enter Keyword:. Minerals and Crystals - Gems - Hope Diamond.

Minerals: The Building Blocks Born of fluid, heat, and pressure, minerals dazzle us with their breathtaking colors and shapes and astonish us with their usefulness.

They are forged underground, where forces that have been at work for billions of years continue to make more minerals. A mineral is a naturally occurring, inorganic nonliving solid having a specific chemical composition. When they look for minerals in their own environment, students may find a single mineral specimen such as marble, which is pure calcite.

However, they will probably find rocks, which are mixtures of two or more minerals. Granite, for instance, with its tiny multi-colored grains, is made of quartz, feldspar, and mica. Crystals: The Form Most minerals occur naturally as crystals. Every crystal has an orderly, internal pattern of atoms, with a distinctive way of locking new atoms into that pattern to repeat it again and again.

The shape of the resulting crystaL-such as a cube like salt or a six-sided form like a snowflake -mirrors the internal arrangement of the atoms. As crystals grow, differences in temperature and chemical composition cause fascinating variations.

But students will rarely find in their backyard the perfectly shaped mineral crystals that they see in a museum. This is because in order to readily show their geometric form and flat surfaces, crystals need ideal growing conditions and room to grow. When many different crystals grow near each other, they mesh together to form a conglomerated mass.

Odette sifted through the dirt, searching for a rock shaped differently from the rest: the small, wine-red and green crystal, tourmaline.

They had found just one today, about the size of a knuckle. Odette held it out to me, streaked with red dust, in the middle of her palm. At that moment, it was worth just a few cents. But in the months to come, it would slide along the global supply chain, its value multiplying with each stage of the journey. F or the crystals mined in Anjoma Ramartina, the path out of the country is through a company called Madagascar Specimens , which exports about 65 tonnes of carved crystals a year.

At its premises, a converted house in the outer suburbs of Antananarivo, boxes of crystals were stacked against the wall. A row of shining SUVs were parked outside the house. Samples stood on the disused fireplace: carved angels, pyramids, geodes, wands.

The owner of Madagascar Specimens, Liva Marc Rahdriaharisoa, a tall man in dark jeans, wire-rimmed glasses and a navy T-shirt, gestured to the stack of boxes to his left, packed for shipping. This to Netherlands. He lifted the lid on a box of quartz massage wands. Like therapy, the belief crystals have healing power, you know? It is the biggest market in the world. We go there to exhibit, to sell, but most important is to find customers there.

If I say to people at the mine what Tuscon is like, they will never understand. And if I say to the Tucson people to come here, they will never understand. He acknowledged the poor conditions at the mines he bought from. Madagascar Specimens exports some crystals rough, but its workshop in Antananarivo also works the stones, cutting them into shapes, grinding and polishing the faces. With stone that was exported rough and then carved in China or the US, almost none of the profit stayed in Madagascar.

Gold, cobalt, sapphires, crystals: she sees them all as part of the same old story, resources siphoned out of the country for the benefit of foreign companies. When new mining sites are discovered, sometimes thousands of men migrate to mine, encroaching on protected environmental areas and threatening the survival of endangered species.

T he month after we spoke in Madagascar, Liva Marc and a shipping container full of his stones landed in Arizona, bound for the Tucson shows. I met him in a hotel lobby, one of three retail spots he had in the city.

Business was good, he said. Buyers from all over the world had come. The stalls around him showcased towering display pieces: rose quartz boulders, massive amethyst geodes. They had been cleaned, polished and set on display, but he still looked at them and thought of their origins.

While the crystal business is booming, and largely among consumers who tend to be concerned with environmental impact, fair trade and good intentions, there is little sign of the kind of regulation that might improve conditions for those who mine them. Schoen was speaking on the phone from her office in New Orleans, where she told me she was surrounded by crystals that had been unboxed and laid out, waiting to be blessed by staff, who would burn sage smudge sticks and pray to cleanse them before use.

Instead, Glacce depended on Chinese middlemen to select crystals, including those from Madagascar. They know all these things. The challenge of sourcing crystals ethically is one faced by the industry as a whole: Glacce, Goop or any given Etsy vendor are no more culpable than the next crystal dealer.

Every retailer I spoke to raised the question of price. Would crystal consumers really be willing to pay more to guarantee safer, child labour-free mines, or a fair wage for miners? At Tuscon, in the marquee for crystal vendor The Village Silversmith, I asked owner John Bajoras — tall, tanned and broad-shouldered, with an enormous shark tooth around his neck — where the responsibility lay if crystals were coming from mines where people, many of them children, were risking their lives for meagre pay.

It is all about the customers, Bajoras said. The problem is your end consumer. Not anybody else in the pipeline. The end consumer is the person who sets the price. Bajoras visited Madagascar often, but rarely made it out to the mines, opting instead to deal with middlemen in the cities.

All our rose quartz comes from that area. And if some of the conditions are truly awful? The volume of his voice rose slightly, but he was still smiling. I feel for you. I would rather die in a mine, any day, no doubt. Holy shit. Not happening. Spell check? Bajoras was confident his stones had healing power. And when you broke it down to an elemental level, he said, people are mostly minerals and water anyway. Beneath a tented canopy beside the Tucson freeway, his colleague Alexa Stamison was selling an array of Madagascan rose quartz, carnelian and amethyst.

Stamison had a warm, open manner and an encyclopedic knowledge of their stones. A woman dressed all in white — crocheted shirt, maxi skirt and headscarf draped over her top-knot — approached the stall. A stone of empowerment, Stamison told me, great for women going out on their own or moving into a new home.

Dark crystals: the brutal reality behind a booming wellness craze — podcast. Read more.