Stone colour chart

Searching for a stone by its colour

It is often the first instinct: you have a green, blue or purple stone in your hand, and you would like to know what it might be. Our interactive colour chart offers thirteen clickable hues — from red to black by way of colourless and multicoloured — and gives you, for each one, the matching stones with their Mohs hardness.

The great colour families

Green stones are legion: emerald and peridot (transparent), jade, malachite, aventurine, amazonite, serpentine, unakite (opaque or translucent). Blues run from limpid aquamarine to deep lapis lazuli, taking in turquoise, sodalite, azurite, sapphire and blue topaz. Purples can be counted on one hand — amethyst, fluorite, charoite, tanzanite — which makes purple a convenient colour for identification.

Reds and pinks include ruby, garnet, carnelian, red jasper, rose quartz, rhodochrosite, rhodonite and spinel — the last of which fooled the crowns of Europe for centuries: the famous “Black Prince's Ruby” in the British Crown Jewels is in fact a spinel.

The colour trap

It must be said plainly: colour alone never identifies a stone. First, because one mineral comes in every shade — quartz is colourless, purple (amethyst), yellow (citrine), pink, brown (smoky quartz), and fluorite does just as well. Second, because colour can be faked: white howlite dyed to pass as “turquoise”, agates in impossibly garish colours, quartz coated with an iridescent film.

Colour is therefore a starting point, never a conclusion. Cross-reference it with transparency and hardness in our identification by criteria tool — and to settle the matter, use Lapidem's AI photo identification, or the porcelain streak test described in our guides.