- Fruit quartz
'Fruit Quartz' is the general trade term for a group of colorful, translucent materials which are individually known by
fruit -like names such as "cherry quartz", "blueberry quartz", "strawberry quartz", "kiwi quartz", "pineapple quartz", and so on. They are commonly carved into jewelry components such asbeads orpendants or into decorative objects.Despite the
quartz part of their name, they are not natural stone despite sometimes being mistaken or miscalled as such. Instead, they are synthetic materials that are essentially a form ofglass . An oddity of these synthetic fruit "quartzes" is that when closely examined, their colors are concentrated in the form of translucent or opaque inclusions within a transparent colorless matrix. Likegoldstone , their production method precludes directly casting the material into small, detailed shapes, which instead must be created by physically carving them from larger rough blocks.Although similar-looking (and similarly named) varieties of natural quartz do exist, they are comparatively very rare and expensive. The bright color of genuine strawberry quartz is accentuated by small seedlike inclusions of lepidocrocite and
hematite . Genuine pineapple quartz comes from Antsirabe, Madagascar, and is a form ofcitrine with an unusual growth pattern of crystals around its sides similar topineapple fruit. Blue quartz has inclusions of ilmenite.
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