Brilliant Gemstones & Minerals

The following is a list of Brilliant gems and minerals listed in our database. Click the pictures to get full data, click the X to remove the gem from the list.

Titanite

Titanite: Titanite is a very rare calcium titanium silicate that is an important ore of titanium. It is also called Sphene. Its crystals are very rare, brilliant, and sparkles like diamond. It appears as crystals that are prisms with pyramid tips, or stubby, wedge-shaped, flattened crystals, or tabular and platy. There are also titanite crystal twins that have grown side by side or interpenetrated, or in g (read full)

Chrysoberyl

Chrysoberyl: Chrysoberyl appears as prismatic, tabular crystals often v-shaped twins forming pseudo-hexagonal crystals. Single crystals are rare. May be colorless, green, yellow, gray or brown. A variety, alexandrite, is red in tungsten light but dark green in daylight. This pronounced color change is highly-prized, and the exact tone of colors is important, the ideal being brilliant green turning to fie (read full)

Zircon

Zircon: Zircon is a zirconium silicate with a tetragonal crystal system, and also contains thorium and uranium. It appears as stubby, prismatic, isolated or sometimes dipyramidal, like two pyramids connected at their bases; or in twins, colorless to yellow, red, brown, gray or green, in irregular granules. It is very hard, heavy, with indistinct cleavage, and shell-like fracture. It is sometimes perfect (read full)

Rubellite Tourmaline

Rubellite Tourmaline: Rubellite is the pink to red variety of Tourmaline, which is a complex borosilicate of aluminum and alkali, with iron, magnesium, and other cations. It is found as fine acicular crystals in rocks, or as large individual crystals grown upon matrix where they may reach a weight of several kilograms. Most form elongated and striated trigonal (three-sided) prisms and these are terminated with trigona (read full)

Ruby

Ruby: Ruby is the most valuable variety of Corundum. The color varies from fiery vermilion to violet red, but because rubies are pleochroic, different colors are also found in the same stone; bright or sometimes brick red in one direction, tending to carmine in the other. The color is also accompanied by marked fluorescence which is stimulated by ordinary, artificial light, and above all, by the ultra (read full)

Oligoclase

Oligoclase: Oligoclase is a mineral of the plagioclase feldspar series, other members of which are Labradorite and Anorthite. It forms as tabular crystals, which are commonly twinned, with parallel or criss-cross twinning striations. It appears as massive, granular, or compact. It may show brilliant reflections from inclusions. It is light, transparent to translucent, with a vitreous luster and may come in (read full)

Opal

Opal: Opal is hydrated silicon dioxide. It has the same chemical composition as quartz but contains about one-tenth (and sometimes as much as one-third) water. It is never crystalline, but it displays a rich play of colors, or "fire" caused by the internal refraction of light by the array of tiny spheres of amorphous silica which for a compact, three-dimensional network in the mineral. It may be somew (read full)

Spessartine

Spessartine: Spessartine is the manganese-aluminum variety of Garnet, belonging to its sub-group of aluminum garnets. Garnets are a group of silicate minerals that all crystallize in the isometric system and have the same chemical formula, but in a diversity of proportions, so garnets show up as different varieties, in a broad range of environments. Spessartine possesses the form typical of garnet crystals, w (read full)

Diamond

Diamond: In fact Diamond is the only gem material comprised of a single chemical element: pure carbon, like graphite. But the atoms in diamond have been forced into a compact, three-dimensional structure by the high pressures in the upper mantle, where it is formed. Thus diamond is much harder and has a higher specific gravity (3.52) than graphite . There is nothing comparable to it in hardness; it is ther (read full)

Zoisite

Zoisite: Zoisite is a hydrous calcium aluminum silicate in the Epidote group, with an orthorhombic crystal system, three crystal axes at right angles to each other, all of varying lengths. It appears in elongated, prismatic crystals, with fine parallel lines on the prism faces and usually poorly terminated. It also appears frequently in formless grains, poorly-defined crystals, rodlike aggregates and gran (read full)