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This month’s crystal feature is a well known stone that’s often mislabelled! read on to find out more about jasper, and take our quiz to see how many you get right!

Table Of Contents

• What Is Jasper?
• Let’s Play Jasper Or Not!
• Why Are So Many Stones Incorrectly Called Jasper?
• Jasper In The Shop

What Is Jasper?

Jasper is an opaque (meaning not translucent – solid – light doesn’t pass through the stone) variety of Chalcedony. Chalcedony is defined as a microcrystalline silica, in other words, a form of Quartz where the individual crystals are so tiny and tightly clustered together that they’re not visible to the naked eye.

Read our article “CRYSTAL TREE: CHALCEDONY” to learn more about Chalcedony and its varieties.

Take The Quiz!

Turn on the sound for gameshow feels and see how many you get right!

Why Are So Many Stones Incorrectly Labelled?

There are lots of beautifully coloured varieties of Jasper in the mineral world. But Jasper is also one of the misused identification names in the crystal industry. It helps to understand how new stones get their names. There are over 4,000 unique minerals that have been identified, and they are catalogued by geologists into families that share certain characteristics. Generally, they share a similar chemical make up.

Most of the time, a stone can be identified by a series of tests. Visual characteristics like the crystal form (the shape its grown in), its cleavage (i.e. how it breaks), streak (the colour it makes if you scrape it on a white plate), hardness (whether its harder or softer than other identified minerals), colour and specific gravity (some minerals have a higher density or lower density than others). We also take into consideration the locality – the area that the mineral formed in can tell us what might be or not be present.

Sometimes however, the only way to conclusively identify a mineral is through chemical analysis. This involves breaking down a sample of the mineral to its constituent parts to see which chemicals make up the whole. Its expensive and requires specialised equipment operated by trained professionals – certainly not something the average miner or even mineral distributor has easy access to.

So it’s not always a straightforward process to identify something new. And sometimes, people guess wrong. The trade name gets out there, and it sticks. Jasper is one of those names that has been attached to so many opaque colourful stones because it is well known, so it’s a common guess.

Jasper In The Shop