As far as gemstones go, clear quartz is relatively nondescript, at least to the casual observer, so it’s not the trickiest stone to imitate using deceptive techniques, meaning you need to be wary of fakes when buying online.
Don’t let me panic you, though. The chances that your clear quartz is a genuine artifact are higher than many pessimistic crystal collectors might believe, but the ability to tell the real from the fake is still an invaluable skill.
The good news is that, although its simplicity makes it rather easy to forge, we can also use it to our advantage when assessing authenticity. Here’s how it’s done!
Testing Clear Quartz For Authenticity
Imperfections Are A Good Thing
All quartz, no matter the hue, will be riddled with artifacts known as inclusions, imperfections caused by liquid or gas becoming trapped within the stone over the course of its formation.
These fractures and hydrothermal veins often appear as crisscrossing threads within the body of the stone.
Despite the “clear” part in this gem’s title, genuine specimens will have an abundance of these beautiful imperfections, so many that clarity is significantly reduced, the stone looking a little cottony and cloudy on the inside.
If your clear quartz really is clear, meaning you can see through it almost perfectly, or that there doesn’t seem to be many of the imperfections described above, then I’d hazard a guess that what you’ve actually got there is glass.
Unless we’re talking about tektite or obsidian – which we’re not – glass is a man-made substance, the super-cooled liquid product of super-heated sand.
It has not gone through the same natural formation processes as quartz, meaning it won’t have any cleavage planes or inclusions.
Not All Imperfections Are A Good Thing: The Bubble Botheration
If the forger of a fake piece of clear quartz is worth their salt, they’ll be capable of threading in some fake powdered inclusions during the glass smelting process. It’s a crafty move; I’ll give them that, but that’s not enough to fool us!
To ascertain if we’ve got some lovely quartz or some bog standard glass, all we have to do in this situation is keep our peepers peeled for the usual suspects… air bubbles!
That’s right, friend; all it takes to catch a seller out is a few little air bubbles suspended in the “stone”.
Granted, bubbles can also be found in genuine quartz, but they’ll typically be a lot bigger than the minuscule bubbles found in most glass products, so you’ll be able to tell the difference.
Glass bubbles are small enough as to look insectile, while quartz bubbles will be near pea-size.
A Relationship With Light
Not only can we assess the general clarity of the stone to test authenticity, we can also examine how light behaves as it passes through our alleged clear quartz, as quartz and glass have very different refractive indices.
As a silicate formation, clear quartz has a distinctly turbulent relationship with light, in that it doesn’t let it pass through without a scuffle. Glass, by contrast, is more of an open door, so to speak.
All we have to test the refractive qualities of our stone is to place it on top of some clear, printed text, so grab your favorite book, crack it open, and plonk your crystal down.
What does the text look like through the crystal?
Is it…
a. Distorted in a number of seemingly random ways — circus mirror style
b. Magnified and mildly distorted by the cut of the crystal
If answer a. seems more accurate, then congratulations; the chances are you’ve got some real clear quartz — hooray! If answer b. is more on the money, then it’s possible you’ve just wasted yours on a fake crystal — dang!
The Drop Test
Formed by millions of years of intense pressure beneath the Earth’s surface, clear quartz has an incredibly robust atomic architecture — we’re talking 7 on the Mohs hardness scale!
Being that the highest possible score is 10 (diamond), clear quartz is one tough customer, and we can use this brute strength to our advantage when testing for authenticity.
What I need you to do here is simply drop your crystal on a hard surface from a decent height. If it’s real quartz, it should come out of the fall unscathed.
Glass, on the other hand, may shatter or take on a surface fracture, while plastic will scratch easily.
The Burn Test
Next up in our geological witch hunt, we’re going to be burning our quartz at the stake! — Just kidding… but we will see how it reacts to fire. Grab a match or a lighter, head to a well-ventilated space, light it up, and give the flame a few licks of your crystal.
If it’s made of plastic, you will notice a mild disfigurement as well as a foul smell. As soon as you notice either, stop immediately, as the fumes emitted by burning plastic are toxic.
Should your crystal survive this with nothing but a black soot mark, it’s a genuine witch clear quartz.
Simply wipe the soot away with a damp cloth and it will be good as new!
The Temperature Test
Authentic quartz is temperature resistant, meaning it’s not a great thermal conductor, which is why it will almost always be cooler than glass, even if stored in the same place.
But if you can’t tell the coldness of the crystal from the coldness of some glass, then test to see how the two materials react to warmth.
Either holding the test subjects to your cheek or in your hands, measure which seems to warm the most. Real quartz will barely react to your body temperature, whereas a glass surface will be markedly warmer than it was beforehand.
The Sonority Test
Now, this is a really cool test, but you will need another crystal and a piece of glass to give it a go. First, what we’re going to do is tap the quartz in question against our glass, and listen to the sound they make.
Glass on glass should make a high-pitched chink or clink sound — Imagine people toasting and at a party. If there’s a definite chink, but seemingly only from one of the materials, it could well be that your quartz is real.
To confirm our suspicions and bring the sonority test to a close, we’re going to tap our quartz against another piece of quartz.
If both are real, we should hear no glassy clink, rather, the subdued cracking sound you’d expect to hear when colliding ordinary rocks.
The Calcite Conundrum
Has your quartz passed every single one of my authenticity tests so far? Brilliant, but before you go jumping for joy, you should know that calcite, a similar-looking mineral often used to imitate clear quartz, will have also passed my tests.
No need to worry, though, as there’s an easy way to tell calcite and clear quartz apart — Shine a bright light on them and observe their luster.
Calcite will have a waxy luster, almost as if it’s shrouded by a thin layer of grease, but clear quartz, although comparatively dull, will have more of a clear, vitreous luster.
Final Thoughts
There you have it! — 8 methods of determining the authenticity of clear quartz.
Individually, none of these tests are completely conclusive, but if you try them all, and your crystal passes with flying colors (or flying colorlessness anyway), then congrats! You’ve got yourself a bona fide bounty of clear quartz!