Fluorite, Montrose Occurrence, Niagara Falls, Ontario

A 20 x 15 mm transparent blue cube on a 120x90x70 mm matrix

(Yes, it's blue in person, but the camera sees it as purple, needs to be tweaked.)

Photo by Marty Lewadny

A few extra-nice fragments of gem grade blue fluorite. Much of this material is found locked inside matrix, as the crystals often keep growing until the space is full. I've seen partial cubes to 35 mm and irregular masses to 5 cm+.  (Murphy's law of mineral collecting - the nice big roomy vugs are invariably devoid of minerals, while in the smaller vugs the crystals grow from wall to wall with no faces!) Plus a lot of crystals are either broken upon extraction, or were broken by the blasting process years ago. So for every good freestanding crystal, you'll get a fair number of fragments, all of which I squirrel away. Anything decently crystallized is saved, you'll notice these have no specimen value.

I haven't cobbed or cleaned this stuff up, it's as found, and I'm not sure if anybody has cut it before, but it certainly looks like some good stones can be facetted from it.

This fluorite is color change, a nice blue under sunlight and purple under incandescent, and the camera sees it as purple, which makes it challenging to photograph accurately. It's not as blue as the fluorite from Blanchard, NM, but still nice, and very unusual for the province. I've tweaked the colors in PhotoShop to look as accurate as possible, but it still looks a lot sexier in person.

Largest piece, on the right, is 25 mm across