Rose Quartz vs. pink Quartz

•Rose quartz always occurs in massive form without crystal faces or terminations. Translucent and with uniform color distribution, it is found mainly in the core zones of granite pegmatites.

Mineralogists had traditionally attributed the color of rose quartz to traces of titanium and, to a lesser extent, iron and manganese. These impurities were thought to distort the crystal lattice, causing it to reflect and transmit red wavelengths of light which the human eye perceives as varying shades of pink.

More recent studies have shown the pink color is because of fibrous inclusions. After dissolving rose quartz from several different sources in hydrofluoric acid, researchers have recovered residues of flaky, pink-colored nanofibers, most consisting of dumortierite and other aluminum borosilicates.

Although these nanofibers make up only about one-tenth of one percent of the overall weight of rose quartz, they are highly reflective and create both its characteristic pink color and its soft translucency. Usually aligned along the axes of quartz’s hexagonal crystals, these inclusions also explain the six-rayed asterism that appears in the star variety of rose quartz.

•Pink quartz, a pink macrocrystalline variety of quartz, was discovered in pegmatites at Rumford, Maine, and first described in mineralogical journals in 1938. But these specimens attracted little attention from mineralogists or collectors at the time, Initially, they were assumed to be a rare, atypical subvariety of rose quartz.

Then in 1959, pegmatite miners in Brazil’s gemstone-rich Minas Gerais state discovered clusters of beautifully developed, terminated, hexagonal quartz prisms. These crystals had water-clear transparency and a pink color that was similar, but not identical to, the color of rose quartz. When these specimens appeared on the collector markets of Europe and the United States, the limited supply was snapped up by both collectors and mineralogists.

Mineralogists soon learned that the color of pink quartz, unlike that of rose quartz, is created when some silicon ions within the quartz crystal lattice are replaced by trivalent aluminum ions and pentavalent phosphorus ions. This partial replacement renders the lattice susceptible to distortion from the energy of natural geophysical radiation, creating color centers that form when radiation displaces phosphorus ions from their normal lattice positions, leaving

voids that trap electrons. When white light boosts these trapped electrons to higher energy levels, they return to their normal levels by releasing excess energy as visible light that we perceive as pink or pale red.