Serandite

Item Description

Serandite is, to many of us, the most beautiful and unique of all specimen crystals of Mont St Hilaire's odd minerals, for its unique salmon pink color. This is a classic crystal, perfectly textbook in shape, from the glory hole finds of the 1980s - such crystals were not found later, and now they are truly antiques. This is complete all around, and is more properly a miniature as it stands vertically - although Shields Flynn had it squeezed into a diagonal in a TN box, to fit his thumbnail collection. When I was younger, and went to the mine myself, I wrongly thought these were pink feldspars....and like most people, thought it occurred in a variety of colors. However this has now been understood better and the lighter colored examples, often with thin blade shapes, turn out to be another mineral entirely according to this note on MINDAT: Serandite is the manganese analogue of pectolite and the sodium analogue of tanohataite. Part of serandite-schizolite-pectolite series.Many of the lighter pink "serandites" are schizolite. They can't be sorted visually. None of the deep orange serandites are schizolite.