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Equoniz t1_j69gmy2 wrote

Reply to comment by CrustalTrudger in can gemstones be melted into a gradient? by Acceptable_Shift_247

I’ve seen a (presumably not faked, but 🤷‍♂️) natural gemstone posted somewhere on here that was a different type on either side of the stone. I forget what they actually were (I think they were purple and orange though, so maybe amethyst and…something orange?), but is there a natural process for producing this sort of thing? I’m assuming it would be very dependent on the exact stones, and wouldn’t just work with any combo, if it’s possible at all. Maybe it was the same type of crystal with different impurities?

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CrustalTrudger t1_j69n5ai wrote

> Maybe it was the same type of crystal with different impurities?

Most likely. You can get things like gradations between amethyst (a purple type of quartz) and citrine (an orange type of quartz) in a single crystal because it's all quartz with different things substituting into the lattice. Some minerals can have really complicated intergrowths and gradations of versions themselves, e.g., tourmaline does all sorts of weird stuff, but importantly all have effectively the same lattice structure.

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42nbeyond t1_j6aihka wrote

You can get natural bicolour tourmalines, that would make for a very cool ring. They are usually green and purple, I believe.

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Shambud t1_j6aq1p4 wrote

Tourmaline mine near me pulls up one’s that look like slices of watermelon, red-white-green. They’re cool looking stones for sure.

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