Clear Quartz Tumbled Gemstone

Stable and water-safe at hardness 7. Keep polished spheres out of direct sunlight — they can focus light like a lens and scorch nearby surfaces.

Clear Quartz grows wherever silica-rich water finds space and time — in hydrothermal veins, pegmatites, and rock cavities, where dissolved silicon dioxide slowly stacks itself into six-sided prisms. The finest specimens come from Brazil, the Ouachita Mountains of Arkansas, Madagascar, and the high Himalayas.

Clear Quartz is macrocrystalline quartz, pure silicon dioxide (SiO2) in the trigonal crystal system, with a vitreous luster and a hardness of 7. It is piezoelectric, producing a small electric charge under pressure, which is why quartz keeps time in watches and stabilizes frequencies in electronics.

• The ancient Greeks named quartz krystallos, meaning ice, believing it was water frozen by the gods so completely it could never thaw.
• In Japanese lore, clear quartz was said to form from the breath of the White Dragon and was honored as the perfect jewel, a symbol of purity and patience.
• Wealthy Roman women carried polished quartz spheres in summer to cool their hands, and Roman physicians used crystal spheres to focus the sun's rays.