Pink Fluorite (''floater'' specimen)

Item Description

When it comes to Fluorite as a species, collectors and dealers will often cite pink (rarely red) as most desirable color. This is because there only a few places in the world where this shade of Fluorite is found. Most notably the finest pink / red Fluorites ever found are those from the Swiss, Italian and French Alps in Europe. Going back to August of 2019, there was a discovery of some of the most significant pink Fluorite specimens ever seen at the Huanggang Fe-Sn deposit, in Inner Mongolia, China. These specimens are genuinely some of the most important Fluorites found from any locality in China. It's important to remember the many tens if not hundreds of thousands of specimens of Fluorite that have been found in the last few decades, and these specimens from Huanggang certainly stand in the upper ranks. These piece are comparable to their Alpine counterparts, especially because they have the same habit and color, but in the case of the Chinese material, some of the crystals were incredibly GEMMY and actually facet-grade. This beautiful miniature specimen is a superb example of this material. It features multiple, very sharp, well-formed, GEMMY, beautiful pink color octahedral crystals measuring up to 2.2 cm across with no matrix. The piece is a complete "floater", as it's crystallized all the way around, with no point of attachment I can see. If you look closely, you'll see very thin acicular inclusions of a green mineral (either Hedenbergite or an Amphibole species) frozen inside some of the Fluorite crystals. This combination of green and pink together is very appealing, and also resembles some European Alpine Fluorites! The color looks good in incandescent light, but with a slightly bit stronger pink hue under halogen lights. A wonderful specimen of this now hard to find material, as these pink Fluorite crystals from Huanggang seem to have been mined out, as it's possible we may never see them again.