Amorphous Amethyst?

Hi all,

Is there such a thing as amorphous amethyst? (i.e. Amethyst with no crystal structure). The other day I saw a piece of what was suppost to be amorphous amethyst. It looked like a very bad piece of purple glazed pottery. I can't remember the location for it, could have been brazil?

Would be interesting to find out more about this!

Stephen

Hi Stephen,

per definition, Amethyst is a variety of Quartz, it is trigonal cristallised. Amorphous material, e. g. violet glas, is not to be called Amethyst.

Greetings from Goslar

Georg

It may be very-fine-grained quartz/amethyst, but then you could rather call it jaspis or chalcedony.

All of the types of quartz can form masses as join fillings in the host rock, it's more commonly referred to as 'massive' rather than amorphous.