Plenty of crystals on the market have been altered, and plenty aren't what they're sold as. Neither is a problem if you're told. This is what the common treatments actually are, how to spot them, and how to tell a natural piece from a treated one or an outright fake.

Two different things get confused constantly. A treated stone is real material that's been altered; heated, dyed, irradiated, or stabilised. A fake is something sold as a mineral it isn't, or as mineral when it's glass or plastic. One is a real crystal with something done to it. The other is a lie about what the thing is.

Treatment isn't the problem. Most of it is long-established, accepted, and sometimes the only way certain material reaches the market at all. The problem is undisclosed treatment; paying natural prices for altered material because nobody told you. So the rule is simple. We state treatment on every piece, and this page tells you what those treatments are.

Start with plausibility. Ask whether the colour you're looking at occurs naturally in that mineral at that intensity. Vivid blue quartz, jet-black "obsidian" points that are too glassy, neon-bright agate slices; these are colours nature rarely or never produces in that species, and a colour that shouldn't exist is your first flag. Knowing what a mineral's natural colour range actually is does more than any test.

Then check the price against the claim. Fine natural colour is rare and priced accordingly. A deep, even, "perfect" colour at a low price is usually telling you it was helped; genuinely top natural material doesn't sell cheap. Price that seems too good for the colour on offer is information.

Then look closely at the surface and the breaks. Dye collects in cracks and concentrates along fractures; run your eye over any chips or natural openings and look for colour that's pooled rather than grown. Coatings sit on top of the stone and scratch or wear at the edges, and produce metallic sheens no mineral makes.

What none of this catches is heating and irradiation. Both change the material from within and leave no surface trace; there is no fingertip test, and anyone who tells you they can always spot heated citrine by eye is overselling. For these, you are relying entirely on the seller knowing the treatment and stating it. That isn't a gap in your skill; it's the limit of what any eye can do, and the precise reason disclosure isn't optional.

Fakes are a different check, and often an easier one. Glass sold as quartz gives itself away; air bubbles trapped inside, a warmth to the touch that quartz doesn't have, and colours too uniform to be natural. Plastic is lighter than it should be and warmer still. Reconstituted material; ground-up stone bound with resin and pressed into shape; shows an even, speckled texture without the natural patterning of the real thing.

Weight, temperature, and a careful look at the surface catch most fakes. The eye that knows what real material looks like is the best tool there is, which is the skill the rest of these guides are built to give you.

Every piece we sell states its species, documented locality, and treatment status plainly. Natural where it's natural, and exactly what's been done where it hasn't. No stone sold as something it isn't.