Spinel ("floater")

A beautiful and excellent quality floater octahedron of gorgeous lavender colored Spinel. The faces are incredibly smooth and lustrous, and you can see this is a textbook example of a single octahedron. The crystal is quite gemmy, with good sized sections inside the crystal that are WATER CLEAR when backlit. Hard to photograph, but really attractive in person, and a nice piece to add to any thumbnail collection or a suite of gem crystals. The crystal shows an interesting and eye-catching fluorescence under UV light with shades of pink, purple and even a slightly greenish-blue tone.

The area around Mogok is world famous for producing the finest crystals and gems of Spinel in the world. Many of these crystals have yielded the most impressive red Ruby Spinel gems ever found. Mogok is most likely the site of the discovery of the famous Black Prince's Ruby in the Crown Jewels of the UK. The significance of the stone in the crown is that it was actually revealed to be a giant (170 carat) Spinel, and not a Ruby as had been thought for centuries. Spinels are typically found in opaque, dark crystals, but we were fortunate to pick up a parcel of not only colorful but GEMMY crystals direct from the source!

Specimen #SPINEL111916