Description

This is a super little specimen for a few reasons. The fluorite crystals are bright, highly lustrous and glassy – water clear in places. And they are accented by a cute calcite crystal on top (or at one end, depending on how you prefer to display it). The cluster is a floater, or if it was attached at the back (hard to say) it is viewable from almost any angle. But for me (since I love crystal morphology) the best about this is the beautiful morphology. The fluorite crystals are predominantly cubes, but with dodecahedral forms (bevels on the cubes) and trapezohedral forms at the corners – each cube corner is truncated by a group of three trapezohedral faces. The trapezohedral faces are discernible with the naked eye but easier to see with a loupe – and they are a bit tricky, since several corners are a bit “stepped”. So cool!

The specimen is in excellent condition – a couple of very small cleaved corners, facing down and very minor relative to the specimen, could easily be mistaken for octahedral corners – you have to search them out to even find them. There are inclusions and actually what appear to be phantoms as well – however, because the phantoms have a sugary texture, their form is hard to make out. I’ve eliminated most reflections in a couple of the photos to show these internal features.

This is one sweet fluorite miniature!