Journal

Drop announcements

Drop announcements are the backbone of the journal: each post walks through the pieces in a drop, one at a time, with what they are and where they were mined. It starts with the first drop, the launch post for the pieces with their own posters, from a milky quartz cluster out of San Juan County, Colorado, to a pale blue celestite cluster. Every drop post names each piece, its locality and its hardness, and links to its page. The list still hears about every drop before the shop does.

New arrivals and the science behind them

New arrivals get the science behind them in plain words: why milky quartz is white, why kyanite has two hardnesses, why smoky quartz is smoky. Each post links the pieces it covers, so you can go straight from the story to the photo and the label. Treated or coated pieces get called out in the post, the same as on the label.

Locality notes

Locality notes explain the places printed on the labels: what kind of rock a piece grew in, what else was mined there and why collectors care. San Juan County, Colorado, is old gold and silver country, where quartz filled the veins miners followed to the ore. Minas Gerais, Brazil, is famous for pegmatites, coarse granite pockets that grow big gem crystals. South Africa is the classic source of spirit quartz, the amethyst coated in tiny crystals that the first drop calls cactus quartz.

Colorado rock show season

Colorado rock show season gets its own posts, because Denver hosts one of the biggest gem and mineral show weeks in the country. Start with the Denver Gem and Mineral Show guide for what to expect.

How the journal is written

The journal is written the same way as every label in the shop: plain facts, the real locality and nothing invented. Lore shows up when it is interesting, always marked as belief or history, never as chemistry. When a fact is uncertain, it stays out of the post until it can be checked.