Quartz var: Amethyst

Item Description

A fine quality cabinet sized display piece of this fairly hard to find material from one of the best localities for Amethyt in France - Les Isserts. Fine, sharp, well-formed, lustrous, translucent, sharply terminated pyramidal crystals, to 2.1 cm, have a light purple hue internally, but when they're backlit, you can seen "phantom"-esque darker lines that run down the edges of the crystals, creating a very pleasing effect. The crystals rest on banded Quartz underneath, adding even more character. Very good quality, with only minor imperfections I can find on the display side of the specime. Some of the finest recent French amethysts have come from here. The piece probably dates to the 1980s. Mineral specimens, in general, are seldom available from here. Excellent and uncommon from the locale.
From the collection of the long time, beloved, well-known French field collector, Paul Zerfass (Collection #434). Zerfass built this worldwide collection over nearly 50 years, many of which were personally collected. A biography featuring specimens from his collection (along with his face on the cover) is in the May - June 2017 issue of French mineral magazine, Le Règne Minéral. We have a .pdf copy of the article for anybody interested in reading it (though it's mostly in French). Just drop us a line and know that you'd like to have a copy.