2.65" Vibrant Purple Fluorite - Sweet Home Mine, Colorado

Vibrant Purple Fluorite - Sweet Home Mine, Colorado #283841

This is a 2.65" wide cluster of intense purple fluorite crystals from the famed Sweet Home Mine in Park County, Colorado. This is one of the world's best localities for rhodochrosite, though it also produces spectacular, richly colored fluorite specimens such as this one. This crystal cluster is a beauty, showing off numerous lustrous faces in octahedral habit on a quartz matrix. The fluorite glows a deep purple under short-wave UV light, and upon close inspection the crystals have a colorless outer layer over their purple interiors.

Fluorite is a halide mineral comprised of calcium and fluorine, CaF2. The word fluorite is from the Latin fluo-, which means "to flow". In 1852 fluorite gave its name to the phenomenon known as fluorescence, or the property of fluorite to glow a different color depending upon the bandwidth of the ultraviolet light it is exposed to. Fluorite occurs commonly in cubic, octahedral, and dodecahedral crystals in many different colors. These colors range from colorless and completely transparent to yellow, green, blue, purple, pink, or black. Purples and greens tend to be the most common colors seen, and colorless, pink, and black are the rarest.

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