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A specimen is only as good as what you know about it. This guide covers the four things that decide what a mineral is actually worth; what it is, where it formed, whether it's been treated, and what's documented. Learn to read those, and you can assess any piece, from any seller.
The difference between a collector and a buyer is information. A buyer picks the piece that looks best. A collector knows the species, the locality, the treatment status, and the formation behind it; and prices the piece accordingly.
None of that is intuition. It's four things you can measure. Quality. Locality. Treatment. Provenance. Read those four, and no seller can tell you something a specimen doesn't support.
The Mohs scale ranks mineral hardness from 1 to 10. Not trivia. It tells you how to handle, store, and display a piece without damaging it.
Selenite sits at 2; it scratches with a fingernail. Calcite is 3. Fluorite is 4. Quartz and its varieties; amethyst, citrine, rose quartz; sit at 7, hard enough to resist everyday scratching. Topaz is 8. The rule that follows: store harder minerals away from softer ones, because a 7 scratches a 4 every time. It's the single most useful number on a specimen label, and most sellers leave it off.
Three categories. Not the same thing. Natural means the piece is as it formed. Treated means it's real material that's been altered; heated, dyed, irradiated, stabilised. Fake means it isn't the mineral it's sold as, or isn't mineral at all.
Most commercial citrine is heat-treated amethyst. Much bright "turquoise" is dyed howlite. Glass passed off as quartz gives itself away; air bubbles, a warmth to the touch quartz doesn't have, colours too uniform to be natural. Dye pools in cracks. These are checks you can make yourself. They're also why we state treatment on every listing, not because we have to, but because it's the information most sellers leave out.
Record every specimen as it enters the collection. Species. Locality. Treatment status. What it cost. Where it came from. A notebook is enough.
This protects value; an undocumented specimen is worth less to a future buyer than an identical documented one. It also sharpens you as a collector, because writing it down forces you to know the piece rather than half-remember it. This is the principle the brand is built on.
Know what you own.
Most mistakes come down to a few specifics. Keep colour-sensitive minerals out of prolonged direct sunlight; amethyst, fluorite, rose quartz and celestite fade under UV. Don't soak water-sensitive species; selenite at hardness 2 and halite will degrade or dissolve. Store soft minerals apart from hard ones so they aren't scratched. Handle terminations and fine points as little as possible; that's where breakage happens.
Beyond that: dust with a soft brush, keep pieces stable so they can't fall, and don't over-clean. Most specimens need far less intervention than they're given.
What hand-selected, batch-inspected and quality-approved mean.
Common treatments, how to spot them, natural versus fake.
Why a documented origin matters, and what it adds to a piece.
Every specimen we sell is listed individually; species, documented locality, and treatment status stated plainly. No two are identical, so we never list them as if they were.
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