We buy amethyst, citrine and gem quartz rough.
Purple, yellow, brown, pink, colourless; typically clean and available in very large sizes.
Send photographs of what you have Tell us the weight and where it is from. There is no obligation.How to tell if this is what you have
Hexagonal prisms with rhombohedral terminations — the most recognisable crystal shape there is. Often as geode linings.
trigonal
Purple, yellow, brown, pink, colourless; typically clean and available in very large sizes.
What it gets mistaken for
Amethyst, citrine and gem quartz is commonly confused with glass, synthetic quartz and fluorite. That cuts both ways — people sell it as something less than it is at least as often as the reverse. If you are not certain what you have, send photographs anyway and say you are not sure. We would far rather look at something and tell you it is not what you hoped than have you throw it back on the heap.
Also traded as: ametrine, prasiolite, rose quartz, smoky quartz.
Where it comes from
We buy amethyst, citrine and gem quartz from Brazil, Uruguay, Zambia, Bolivia, Madagascar, Sri Lanka — and from anywhere else it turns up. A locality we have not listed is an omission, not a refusal.
Treatment
Most commercial citrine is heated amethyst. Irradiation and heating are widespread; synthetic quartz is produced industrially in enormous volume.
Tell us what has been done to it, if you know. We buy treated material where the treatment is a normal part of the trade — what we cannot do is find out afterwards, because then it is a problem for whoever owns the stone next and eventually that is us.
How to photograph it
Daylight, on a plain white surface, and wet and dry both. Rough seen dry is frosted and reads far paler and greyer than the same stone wet — a parcel photographed dry has cost its owner money more times than we can count. Put a coin or a ruler in the frame for scale. The full guide is here.
Send photographs of what you have Tell us the weight and where it is from. There is no obligation.