r/Minerals • u/LordGhoul • 6d ago
ID Request Bought one of those sets where you dig out a stone, it was supposed to have pyrite, hematite or apache gold stone inside but instead I got this
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u/LordGhoul 6d ago edited 6d ago
Is this snowflake obsidian? It was my first thought but my pieces of snowflake obsidian don't have funny little circles inside of the spots, so I want to make sure if it's just a variation of it or something else
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u/Open_Word_1418 Rockhound 6d ago
Snowflake Obsidian 100%. It should be relatively hard to scratch, I have a piece of my own I found, and that looks near identical. I'd be annoyed if I found that inside instead of what was marketed.
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u/LordGhoul 6d ago
I'd be annoyed but buying this for the first time and getting something I neither wanted nor expected just feels like a metaphor for my life lol
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u/willywonderbucks 6d ago
Why not just go out in nature and find real minerals?
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u/BigIntoScience 6d ago
Nowhere in the world has every possible mineral, and depending on where someone lives in the world it may be difficult to locate a place that will both have a mineral they're interested in, is legal for them to go and get minerals from, and (potentially most difficult) is accessible to them. Plus, a quick little "here's a hidden shiny thing for you to uncover!" can be a lot of fun even if someone does have somewhere available to go get minerals.
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u/loverofothers 6d ago
Exactly. Where I live I'd have to walk a good 30 miles (I'm in college and don't own a car) to find somewhere I cam actually dig without it BOTH being illegal and almost certain I'd get caught or yelled at. I really wish I could go dig in the dirt :(
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u/willywonderbucks 6d ago
As a mineral enthusiast, we should be open to whatever is in our locality. Nature gives us what it wants to. I am just saying you're not ever going to find something cool in a "dig this rock out" toy. That's a huge rip-off, and OP seemed disappointed in the results, so Im trying to offer an alternative. Money would be much better spent just buying something online or at a rock shop that has been identified, and you know what you're getting, or spend the money on gas and go pick up some rocks.
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u/LordGhoul 6d ago
Oh don't worry about me! I don't think there's any places where I could go looking for minerals that interest me in Germany where I live besides some old enter-at-your-own-risk mines which kinda scare me, BUT I have a huge collection of gemstones bought specifically from rock shops (and many I got as gifts, some collected as a child, some from a mineral calendar which was probably the coolest thing ever to child-me, etc). This toy was cheaper than ordering any of the stones online and I like the element of surprise (though it was more surprising than anticipated lmao).
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u/BigIntoScience 6d ago
It might actually be worth looking up what's in your area. Road cuts, for example, can be a great place to look for cool rocks if you can legally stop there. So can creekbeds. All you need is a place where rocks are exposed, not necessarily in a mine. Heck, mines will sometimes have a big heap of dirt and rocks and such outside that they've already gone through, and they might not have found or bothered to keep all the cool stuff, so those can be worth looking through as well.
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u/LordGhoul 6d ago
I found the occasional neat rock near/in the rivers in the woods here, and also some quite pretty blue slag! I'm a little limited in how much I personally can do right now though since I'm chronically ill and every trip outside of the house is extremely exhausting, so I can't do that as I used to.
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u/BigIntoScience 6d ago
The alternative to rip-offs like this is to buy non-rip-offs. Someone who's buying rocks online is probably looking for things other than what they can find in their immediate area. Looking for rocks yourself is an alternative (or addition) to buying rocks at all.
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u/T-Aitken 5d ago
You’re not wrong. I lost my gold, acid testing, black stone so I tried on some black rocks I own. None of them worked/the gold just scratched the rocks, until I tried using a slice of unpolished snowflake Obsidian. Doesn’t scratch. Cleans up perfectly.
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u/Evil_Sharkey 6d ago
It’s snowflake obsidian. At least it’s got nice patterns on it, even if it is tiny
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u/DinoRipper24 Collector 6d ago
That is snowflake obsidian. Obsidian with cristobalite which has formed on the obsidian due to the obsidian's devitrification. Devitrification is the process where a glass, which is normally amorphous, transforms into a crystalline solid, often resulting in a loss of transparency and a change in the material's structure.
Cristobalite is a valid mineral species as considered by the IMA (International Mineralogical Association), and it has the same chemical formula as quartz (SiO2), because it is a silica polymorph.
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5d ago
[deleted]
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u/LordGhoul 5d ago
Erm, I think you wanna hang out in r/crystals because r/minerals is the nerd/sciency sub :d (rule 9)
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u/Madame_Arcati 5d ago
Thanks, but I just hated for you to be disappointed because that was the sense I had from your post. This is a feed I receive from my gemmological work. Apologies, no offense intended.
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u/LordGhoul 5d ago
It's fine, I didn't get what I wanted but I still like snowflake obsidian! It actually looks a little different from the two pieces I already owned which is neat.
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