Quartz buyer’s guide

Name the variety

If we sell amethyst or citrine, those have their own guides and their own categories. Use this page when the stone is another quartz, or when you are checking that a colorless or pale stone is not being compared with topaz or sapphire.

Rock crystal is colorless quartz. It is not diamond, white sapphire, or white topaz. A large clean quartz is common. A large clean sapphire is not.

Treatments and imitations

Heat moves amethyst toward citrine. Some quartz is irradiated, dyed, or coated. A coating can wear off. Dyed material should be named. Glass can imitate any of these colors and will not show quartz’s refractive index.

Hardness 7 is fine for many jewels and still scratches if you store it against sapphire or diamond.

Questions

Is rose quartz the same as pink sapphire?

No. Rose quartz is usually translucent rather than transparent, and it is quartz. Pink sapphire is corundum.

Should I use the carat calculator?

Our tool has presets for amethyst and citrine, both near specific gravity 2.65. For other quartz, that same density is the right neighborhood. The listed weight still wins.