To mark the move of New Zealand to Covid-19 Alert Level Two from Level Three, I am posting a Stone of the Day. This is despite today being a Thursday, and this series being posted on Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays. But I deem this to be an important day, with the lifting of a number of restrictions. And this is a worthy stone for the day. New Zealanders have waited patiently for Level Two for more than one and a half months.
I found this stone on Gemstone Beach last year and finished polishing it just a few days ago. It is a white quartz stone. At the beginning of my stone collecting, about four years ago, I used to collect a lot of white quartz stones. They catch the eye on the beach, standing out because of their brilliant whiteness. I found that my eye was automatically drawn to them, at the expense of other stones. I now have a nice collection of polished white quartz stones. But after a while I stopped collecting them, resisting their allure so that I could focus on other types. However, every now and then I come across an exceptional white quartz, worthy of adding to the collection bag.
This white quartz stone is exceptional for three main reasons, size, shape and clarity. First of all, it is a largish stone, at the boundary of the size that can easily be tumbled in a 4 lb barrel. I recently purchased a 12 lb barrel, mainly to be able to polish larger stones. This enabled me to polish this stone without trouble.
Secondly, the stone is pendent-shaped, a symmetrical elongated oval. This is unusual, most quartz stones being asymmetrical in shape unless they are spheroid. Thirdly, this stone is unusual due to the amount of clear quartz in it. The whiteness in quartz is caused by the presence of water, giving rise to white cloudiness. The vast majority of beach quartz is fully white. This stone has some white but has just as much clear quartz, making it translucent and giving it a striking appearance.
There are two “imperfections” in the stone. On one side there is a scarf of percussion, a plane of breakage into the stone a small way. And there are a small number of tiny black specks embedded within it.
