Pink Fluorite (near 'floater' specimen)

Item Description

When it comes to Fluorite as a species, most people will tell you the most desirable color is a strong pink (rarely red) hue, but there only a few places in the world where this color of Fluorite is found. Most notably the finest pink / red Fluorites ever found are those from the Swiss and French Alps in Europe. In August 2019, there was a discovery of some of the most significant Fluorite specimens 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 specimens are certainly 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 2.7 cm across with no matrix. The piece is nearly a complete "floater", as it's crystallized all the way around, with only one small point of attachment on the back where it was intergrown clearly with another Fluorite crystal at one point. If you look closely, you'll see very thin acicular inclusions of a green mineral (either Hedenbergite or an Amphibole species) frozen inside virtually every Fluorite crystal. This combination of green and pink together is very appealing! The color looks good in incandescent light, but even better in sunlight. As a matter of fact, the intensity of the pink color varies quite a bit depending upon the temperature and style of light in which the piece is viewed, so your lighting might make the piece look either softer or more intense than the photos / video listed for this auction.  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.