Your ‘healing’ crystals might not even be crystals
NOT LONG AFTER Malika Mathis opened the shipment of clear quartz towers she’d purchased from a dealer in China, she noticed that something felt off. “I’m not talking energy or anything,” Mathis, who runs the online crystal shop Mother Nature Minerals, tells Popular Science. While high-quality quartz crystals can be very clear, Mathis notes, “I’m looking at it and they’re too clear.” Small fractures and imperfections pock most natural quartz crystals. Some flaws are left over from forming under intense heat and pressure deep inside the Earth. The ones Mathis received had none. Instead, these trinkets contained free-floating, tiny bubbles, almost invisible to the naked eye—a telltale sign that they had not formed inside the Earth at all. To Mathis, the bubbles could mean only one thing: They were made of glass. When…