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Join Adam Barralet, Ashley Leavy, Kyle Perez, and Nicholas Pearson in Episode #6 of the Crystal Confab Podcast as they explore Rose Quartz’ meaning and uses, including:

• Is Rose Quartz actually the ultimate “stone of love”?
• Spotting Rose Quartz crystal fakes
• Rose Quartz for grief & loss
• Working with Rose Quartz at Beltane
• Rose Quartz for fresh starts

Tune in now for a deeper look at Rose Quartz’ meaning!

Crystal Confab Podcast Introduction: Are you just starting with crystals? Or maybe you have a whole collection but aren’t sure how to use them? Join 4 crystal nerds, healers, workers, and lovers for crystal confab, a casual chat about all things crystals.

Adam Barralet: Hello, and welcome to this week’s episode of crystal confab. Today, we’re looking at the crystal of love, or are we? I’ve got a bit of an issue, to be honest with Rose Quartz. I feel it’s a bit like the Kardashians. It gets far more attention than it deserves because there are so many beautiful, loving crystals out there.

But whenever people are talking about love, they go straight to Rose Quartz. So today, me and my gang, we’re gonna kind of unpack rose quartz. What it’s good for, what maybe another crystal might be good for, and maybe throw in some surprise uses for this crystal as well. How are we today, guys?

Ashley Leavy: Oh, good. Good.

Adam: Good. Good. Now, Nicholas, I wanna start with you today. Tell us a little bit, rose quartz, it’s counted as the crystal of love, but where did that come from? And do you think that’s all we can use rose quartz for, love?

Nicholas Pearson: Oh, I’m so glad you asked. This is like my nerdy superpower is, like, tracking down where these, like, little epithets and things come from in our world. And, just casually over the years, I noticed that, like, before a certain point, nobody really makes a strong connection between Rose Quartz and Love. There might be a little kind of anecdotal stuff here or there, but it’s about from the year 1985 onwards, and it’s really, like, more frequent in the late eighties, early nineties that we start to see rose quartz called the love stone pretty universally. So, at some point in the last couple years, I decided to, like, intentionally do a deep dive on this.

I was writing some new curriculum centered around rose quartz. I was like, let’s actually find out where this comes from. And to the best of my knowledge, and I could be wrong, I I would love a larger dataset than I’ve got, but it’s already pretty big. The first time we see rose quartz called the love stone is in, like, one of those classic late eighties books called, Crystal Awareness by Kathryn Bowman, where she just gives it, among other things, she calls it the love stone. However, what happened 1 year later would really cement this.

And there’s a kind of obscure book by today’s standards, but this author was, at least at this point, quite popular. Her name is Connie Church. She released a couple of books. Crystal Clear, which, if you bought it in the eighties, originally came, like, shrink wrapped with a clear quartz crystal to go along with it. So you could do all of the exercises in tandem with the crystal.

And then as a sequel in, 87, so just 2 years after Catherine Bowman books Catherine Bowman’s first book comes out, she puts out a book called Crystal Love. And, of course, it also comes shrink wrapped with a little piece of rose quartz. And throughout the book, she’s constantly referring to this stone as your love stone. Not saying all rose quartz is the love stone, but all the self love exercises you’re gonna do are with this stone, which is now your love stone. It theoretically could have been anything, but she wrote the book about rose quartz, and that’s why it really just kind of became cemented in our collected psyche as the stone of love.

And, I think I think that is a really nice entryway to talking about what rose quartz can do for us, but I kinda have, like, this vendetta against getting too prescriptive and reductionist about crystals. If I asked any human being to summarize their entire life in one word, they’re obviously going to miss most of who they are. You know, I could say that I am a writer, but I also wear a lot of other hats. So rose quartz, of course, is a love stone, but it does so many other things. If we look earlier in history, we start to see that, you know, in more recent history, at least, it’s definitely associated with things like emotional well-being, we’ll say psychological healing, and, like, really broad strokes, which isn’t too far a cry to being a love stone.

But, you know, the farther back in history we go, we start to see that there’s actually some pretty interesting connections to rose quartz. Some of the earliest evidence that we’ve got of its use goes back about 9000 years ago. In what is now modern day Iraq, we’ve got evidence of some carvings, things like cylinder seals and beads and a few other stuff. Here in the Americas, we find, like, pre Columbian artifacts, indigenous artifacts that are mostly blades carved from it, which feels like a pretty unloving application for this stone. We’ve got a few references in, like, let’s say, late antiquity, early kind of classical period to stones that we think could have been rose quartz, but, you know, they weren’t classified as a variety of quartz because that’s not how I mean, geology wasn’t a science yet, and that’s not really how stones were cataloged then.

So we suspect that there might be a few evidences of this stone really being used in healing, but it wouldn’t be until the rebirth of the modern crystal movement that we start to see it, like, used in full force. And, you know, by this point, I think one of, like, my favorite discussions of the activity of rose quartz comes from the writings of Michael Katz, and formerly Ginny Katz, now Isabelle Morton. But…and they…really together in those early writings that they did, like gifts of the gemstone guardians, which is now Wisdom of the Gemstone Guardians, they describe this, like, fourfold activity that comes from working with the energy of rose quartz. And there it’s all kind of centered around this idea of helping us deal with our unexpressed emotions. It’s a stone of emotional healing, but it’s not just, like, focused on bad things.

You know, we tend to in our, you know, modern kind of broader community of energy healing, holistic healing, we tend to focus on resolving the stuff we don’t like, the stuff we don’t want. But rose quartz doesn’t make a strong dichotomy between good and bad. It’s about expressed versus unexpressed. So it stirs hidden emotions to help them become more accessible. It helps us really sit with them and acknowledge whatever they might be.

That’s gonna lead us to a state of understanding of what those emotions are and where they come from. And from there, we have the emotional wherewithal to be able to communicate or express them more effectively and authentically. And we can note that, sure, that could be sadness or pain or loneliness, but it could also be joy. Like, how many times have we just had a wonderful day and then come upon a situation where it’s not really appropriate to share that joy? So we, like, bottle it up for later, and then we forget it’s there, and it, you know, goes sour on the shelf.

So, this is gonna help us really kinda broaden what rose quartz can do for us. Now among all of the emotions that could be unexpressed are love. And I think that’s why we really think of it as a love stone today because if our emotional body, if our psyche is so gummed up with other things that are clogging the pipes, there’s no space for love to flow either. And this takes us into that space of, like, love as a cosmic force, not love as an emotion. Love as a cosmic force, the glue that holds the universe together.

Like, it can’t flow through us if we are clogged. So by expressing, by revealing, acknowledging, integrating, whatever other emotional stuff is there, there’s a room for that kind of cosmic energy of love to flow through us. And that is what allows rose quartz to be a love stone, in my opinion. It’s not like a romance specific stone. We can apply it there, but that’s not its sole function.

Ashley: I would love to jump in with kind of a personal story that I think really illustrates what Nicholas is talking about. So for years, for the first many years that I was working with crystals, I was not at all attracted to rose quartz. I mean, my immediate judgment of rose quartz was, like, boring. You know, I’m not interested. I don’t really care.

I don’t get what the big deal is. I don’t understand why people like this crystal. I never ever ever felt called to it or drawn to it until I really started doing a lot of work to bypass or to work through a lot of the spiritual bypassing that we see in the wellness space, in the healing arts community. So often we wanna just, like, gloss over the things that are difficult, that are challenging, that make us uncomfortable. And, you know, we have this way in the wellness community of framing everything in a way that truly can be a little bit toxic.

And it wasn’t until I started to recognize and acknowledge that that rose quartz really called me in in a big way because, like Nicholas said, you know, it really helps us get in touch with some of those emotions that we haven’t wanted to recognize. And so it allowed me to get in touch with those things, to feel those things, to be in that discomfort while offering me this, like, unconditional support and love and making me feel so loved as I worked through some really hard and really heavy stuff. And that relationship sort of kind of was going in the background, and I didn’t really realize at the time that that’s what was happening. It wasn’t until later that I sort of put that together. But a little while into this process, I lost my grandmother.

My grandmother passed away and she and I were so incredibly close. I mean, she lived a few hours away, but we talked almost every single day on the phone. She was so important to me, is so important to me. And when she died, I was really numb for the first little while. Like, I didn’t even know how to be in my grief.

I didn’t know how to tap into that. I didn’t really want to at the time. I just wanted to shut myself off from it, which obviously wasn’t the most healthy thing, but I just couldn’t figure out how to cope. And I noticed that rose quartz was calling to me consistently over and over, like, wanting to be a part of what was going on for me. And when I finally allowed myself to listen to the guidance that was offering, which was so subtle and so gentle, it’s almost like the stone that really met me where I was at because a lot of times I feel called in by a stone, and I’m ready to go.

I, like, you know, wanna pursue that relationship. I wanna get to know them. Rose quartz was so different. It was so gentle and so subtle, almost like it was just waiting for me to be ready. It wasn’t pushy.

And working with rose quartz in my practice at that time, just sitting with the stone, being in the energy of the stone, keeping a piece on my altar that I have a little well, like Kyle mentioned last week, lots of altars all over. But for one particular altar, which is an ancestor altar, keeping a piece of rose quartz on that ancestor altar, sitting with that rose quartz to connect with my grandmother for months. I mean, for months, and it became a good friend, this piece of rose quartz. I mean, truly was there for me in ways that even the people in my life couldn’t necessarily be there for me. It was there without words.

It was there just almost to bear witness and observe, and it was something that I so needed at that time. And now Rose Quartz and I have the most amazing relationship, and this is one of my most favorite treasured pieces right here. And I just love love the energy that it brings into my space and really reminding me to be present with my emotions even the ones that are

Adam: I think maybe what we need to do is we might need to unpack the word love. In other languages, there are many different words for love, and, you know, we have different loving feelings. I love you guys, but I have different loving feelings for you guys than I do for my partner as opposed to my cat, as opposed to my mother, and so on. Where I personally feel that Rose Quartz is really good in those words, kind of that nurturing love, that supporting love, that healing love, that forgiving love. It’s got that gentle energy.

Where I do love rose quartz, I don’t totally kick it out of my life. It was actually the first crystal that came into my life. Not mine, but when my mother separated from my father, she kind of got into the new age a little bit before me, and she has bought herself a rose quartz that would sit on her bedside table. That’s the only thing I’ve asked her that I’d like to inherit when she passes kind of thing because it was, you know, so important in that nurturing and supportive way. Where I think and where I get a little bit, that doesn’t quite resonate with me is when they’re set when you see people say, if you want to attract love into your life, get a rose quartz as in a partner.

Now we’ve all fallen in love at least once, and, you know, it’s fiery. It’s exciting. It get the blood boiling and the butterflies going and that type of thing. And rose quartz, I find with its soft nurturing energy, not weak, but just nurturing gentle energy. That would be good if you wanted to attract a lover that you’re gonna sit and bend those sudokus all day.

But if you want that fire and that passion, you’ve gotta look for something with, you know, maybe something like a phthalate, a Rhodochrosite, a Tugtupite. If you’re looking for a bit more soul love, go for your morganite or your kunzite or something like that. But I think, for me, rose quartz is that it’s great to have a round of space. It’s great for friends. It’s great for family.

I love to pair it with malachite. I find malachite does a really good bad cop, good cop with rose quartz. If malachite brings the shit up, and then rose quartz will help you work through it in that way. So that’s where I feel that’s where it’s a crystal of love, but it’s not necessarily a crystal of romance.

Ashley: Adam, I know that this is something that people ask about all the time because, you know, owning a crystal shop and just being in the space, this is something customers ask me, students ask me. But I’m curious to know your opinion on this because you kind of brought this up. Like, there are so many people looking to, like, quote, unquote, call in love, call loving. They’re looking for their soulmate. They’re looking for this, for that.

What do you say to those people about how that works when we’re working with our crystals?

Adam: As in which crystal is the best for that or as in, you know, how do we use crystals to attract love into our life?

Ashley: As in I’m gonna lead you there a little bit, I guess, but, you know, I I think that I think there’s a misconception that a crystal is going to be this, like, magic thing to fix your life, and all you need to do is go out and get this crystal, and then you’re gonna find your soulmate. Like, that’s I think the kind of attitude. And I think a lot of this is kind of, you know, part of what we see just from the way that people communicate and the way that we share information now with like social media and stuff like that. Everything is short snippets, little bursts of information, you know? And so there’s really not a lot of room for nuance in these conversations, but yeah, if someone is think is out there thinking, Oh, if I want to call in that love, that soulmate love, that fiery love, I’ll just go get myself the rotocross site and I’ll be good to go.

Check, check the box. Like, what would you say to those folks?

Adam: For me, and I know Kyle will have an opinion on this as well. I always treat crystal like they’re your friends. Your friends are there to support you, to help you in a different way, but they’re never gonna do it for you. So you can’t get your rose quartz, your roto cruise site, your Tugtupite, and then knock, knock, knock. You know, you’re gonna get a knock at the door, and there’s princess or prince charming kind of thing.

They support you. They help to shift your energy. They can help to move things within you. But, yeah, a crystal is not gonna do the work for you. They’re not like Disney magic.

What do you reckon, Kyle?

Kyle Perez: That totally makes sense as to what I really wanted to talk about with rose quartz because for me, it is a stone that helps with wholeness and feeling whole as an individual despite the anger, despite the frustration, despite the sadness, despite all of those things, allowing yourself to just be okay loving all of the parts. And then when you love all parts of yourself, when you access all of that, when you find that balance where you’re not fighting against all these parts, you can call in your partner. You can call in a soulmate. You can call in the balance because you’re not trying to find someone to complete you. You are finding someone that equals you or is a part of that journey.

And that’s literally how I called my husband in 20 years ago, before I even started with crystals, was basically saying to the universe, this is what I’m okay with. This is what I’m not okay with. This is what I will not compromise on anymore, and this is where I’m going to focus. Universe, take care of things because I’m not effing around anymore. This is boring, and just expedite the situation, please, and thank you.

I felt comfortable within myself. I felt good about myself, and we met within 2 weeks of me having that conversation with the universe, and we’ve been together for 20 years. However, my journey with rose quartz came sort of in between maybe 5 or 6 years into my crystal journey when I started to realize there were parts of me that I hadn’t integrated. And the thing that was huge about me is that I’m actually a twin, and I have a twin that passed when we were in the womb together. And it was something that I wasn’t really told about till I was older.

I wasn’t really and there was always a piece missing. And it’s a twin you know it if you’re a twin, if you’re listening, if you’re watching. It’s one of those things that you don’t understand until you’re told about it. From my personal experience, it was like, what is this thing that’s missing? What is this thing I thought I was whole.

I’ve got a partner. I’ve got great friends. I’ve got this work life thing that’s happening that’s really amazing, and there’s something big that is missing. And it was rose quartz that allowed me to stop, listen, and connect to my twin sister in spirit, and I literally have a crystal skull that I work with as a connection to her, as a guide, as a link. But it was first through just a little rough raw piece that I actually found that link, and I found that connection.

This is like a 15 year old rough piece of rose quartz that I found myself just rubbing that tactile nature of rose quartz, that softness, that allowance, that just letting you feel what you’re feeling. And it was like, oh, I’m feeling something missing. What is that thing that’s missing? Let it come in. And it was allowing that energy of realizing I wasn’t whole or wasn’t feeling that wholeness to allow it to come in, and allowed me to see the world differently, experience the world differently, look at the world in a different way.

And that’s where I think rose quartz really comes into its own as a stone of fresh starts, new beginnings, allowing us to undertake things with gusto and enthusiasm and excitement and confidence because we feel wholeness. We feel like we can. We feel like we are okay. We feel good within ourselves. And I think that’s also a little bit about, like, scientifically, it’s not the same as clear quartz, how clear quartz grows in crystal form.

It grows in massive form where it’s all macro crystalline, and it’s all interconnected. Like, it’s explaining that everything is connected. There are many layers of things that make you feel good, many layers of things that make you feel bad. And if we can kind of find a bit of balance in all of it, no way you can give your energy, no way you can start pulling back, no way maybe you’ve been a bit excessive. No way you maybe haven’t been doing enough.

All of this can really come forth when working with rose quartz because it is nurturing you. It’s loving you. It’s supporting you, and it’s giving you that chance to kind of open up to what’s there. I love it as a opening, and it’s allowed me to open to a place of loving things and loving the world and loving myself in a way that I know I wasn’t before, and I know I haven’t. And I will go and work with, in particular, this skull every single week.

Every single week. If it’s not every day, it is every single week I’m working with it. I am reminding myself of the love that I know that I have that is there in the universe, and it’s something that I also love to link with roses as the flower. You know? Stop and smell the roses and see that there is beauty there, see that there is amazing things even if it’s fleeting, even if it’s just for a moment, even if it’s surrounded by thorns, like, there is still beauty there.

There is still a way to connect to really amazing things. Does that make sense?

Adam: Yeah. Totally. And, you know, I one thing I found to kind of add on to that with Rose Quartz is when we are single or when there’s a lack of love in our lives, we focus on I’m not getting the love in whatever format may be, whether it be for, you know, a pretend you want a partner, the partner you’ve got, whatever it may be. I’m not getting.

And I have found Rose Quartz as a really great one for flipping the script on going, well, how can you give more love to the world? And the more love you give, not in that kind of desperate maybe if maybe if I’m nice to people, they’ll love me back, but just focusing on what you can give to the world rather than what you can receive to the world, it does help that flow really nicely as well. I do wanna point out that you mentioned the beauty as well, and, you know, one myth I’ve heard about rose quartz come from the Greeks and the Romans, that links rose quartz to Venus or Aphrodite. And it is said that we know that Aphrodite had a lot of love to give as many of the Greek, gods and goddesses did. And she was having a bit of a love affair with Adonis, the most beautiful man on the Earth.

And Mars or Ares, the god of war, who is a little bit jealous of that, turned himself into a wild boar and attacked Adonis. As Aphrodite went to try and save him or to try and help, she pricked herself on a bare bush, her blood fell upon some white quartz and turned it pink. So there has long been associations I’ve found with Venus and Aphrodite often tied in with that as well. Now we know Aphrodite is the goddess of love, but she’s also the goddess of beauty. And an old practice that I’ve found that is quite relevant to us here in the southern hemisphere coming up because soon we have, or this week, we actually have the celebration of Beltane, which is that midpoint between the spring equinox and the autumn sorry, the spring equinox and the summer solstice.

So this, in a modern day term, your closest kind of energy to this would be Valentine’s Day. It’s a time when we focus on love. It’ll be when the northern hemisphere will be celebrating what’s now called Halloween, but was once called, which is when we focus on the veil between, our world and the other world is at its thinnest. There’s a kind of focus on death, whereas Beltane is focusing on love and bringing in new love and fertility and maybe making babies, if that’s what you’re up for kind of thing. But there’s this practice of putting the rose quartz out in the garden the night before Beltane and then getting up early in the morning, wiping the dew off the rose quartz onto your face, and it’s said to make you as beautiful as Aphrodite.

So I love everyone to give that a bit of a try and let me know how it works.

Ashley: So I wanna jump in because one thing, that I remember reading about rose quartz, and I wish I could attribute the specific author who shared this, but in all the books I’ve read about crystals, I don’t remember. Nicholas, if you happen to know specifically who this might be, jump in and let me know. But there is an attribution somewhere to Cleopatra, going into the Nile and pulling out the cool rose quartz stones from the Nile and rubbing the rose quartz stones with that beautiful, like river water on her skin. And that was said to make her so incredibly beautiful. So we see so much crossover between the Egyptians and the Greeks.

And I wonder if that’s one of those kinds of stories that sort of, you know, changed who was in it, but the root of it stayed the same.

Nicholas: So I’ve seen a variation on this that suggests that to the ancient Egyptians, rose quartz was believed to prevent aging or prevent youthfulness. And there’s a little bit of crossover here. If we look at the writings of Pliny the Elder, who has, you know, some of the oldest lapidary works that we’ve got, there were some early transliterations, you know, out of, you know, out of Roman to other languages that, we see, like, some breakdown terminology used. But, the stones we think might have been rose quartz that Pliny wrote about were anteros or pederos. And anteros was sometimes referred to as Venus’s eyelid.

And, and I think that’s where we actually get this myth about Venus’s or Aphrodite’s, blood staining it. In the original myth is actually how roses got their color, but was reinterpreted by later authors, and even that’s like a fairly recent myth in the grand scheme. But, you know, in the last, like, 40 years or so or so, that got reinterpreted as the myth of staining white quartz, pink. And, that’s kind of modeled after the story of Bacchus or Dionysus and amethyst, which is also a 19th century fabrication and not an ancient myth either. But, yeah, we do have a few iterations of these, you know, early early seeds that were planted that I think hold space for us to have these modern tales that still speak to the same poetry.

They still give us the same kind of mythic morphemes of love and beauty and youthfulness and grace and, you know, all these other things which, you know, builds a platform for us to associate this stone with love today. But it’s also more than that. Right? Because, you know, Venus in her most primal form, like, love was the least important thing she did. She was the goddess of the earth.

She was the embodiment of the sea and the sky and the heavens. She was not just, you know, sex as a creative force, but all creation. She was the goddess of love and war and death and the very stars. She was so much more, and I think that’s a lot like rose quartz. We make it just love today, but it is so much more if we allow it to be.

Kyle: And I think that that’s even really important with the types of rose quartz we are finding now, the newer types of rose quartz, the star rose quartz that is showing both types of asterism, not just epiasterism and stuff, like the light heating up from one side or the other. It actually shows both. But also, like, your lavender rose quartz, your blue rose quartz that’s got Didi Dumortierite in it that’s finding these new inclusions that’s really expanding and changing the way that rose quartz works. Like, the combination of Dumortierite and rose quartz creating this lavendery intuitive, loving energy, I think, is really, really wonderful. And I think we’re finding more complex varieties, which is showing how complex love is really for all of us.

Adam: And do you think maybe as relationships are changing these days that we’re kinda going from that, you know, that the traditional relationship of love, to different ways of that? Do you think, you know, I always find that crystals seem to emerge and bring their presence into our world at exactly the right time. There’s some really interesting ones we’ve found around, like, 1996 and so o,n that just as we got to that 2,000 point. Do you think maybe that’s why we are finding these more unique types of rose quartz now, Kyle?

Kyle: I think it’s really important that we are. Like, we’re realizing that the traditional you have to get all of your love and support from one person thing. Like, it just not practical. It’s not real. And in today’s world, especially, let’s throw it out the window.

We have friendship love. We have pet love. We have soulmate love. We have the love of our career and our work and our plants. There are so many different things that bring love into our life that help us to see the world in a more loving way.

For me, it’s color. It’s music. It’s my cats. It’s the right little things that all make me feel more loved and see the world in a more loving way, and I think we’re able to access each of our own individual connections to that more easily.

Adam: One thing I find that rose quartz can help in that in the domain of love as well, we haven’t quite touched on yet is what I simply refer to as unconditional love. And a lot of people will go, oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I love my partner unconditionally.

And I’m like, so if you got home today and they were in bed with your best friend that burnt down your house and thrown out and broken all your crystals, would you still love them? And they’re like, well, no way. And so my point is that’s an extreme example, but we do have conditions on love. Now think about those of us that are in a relationship or when we’ve been in a relationship, how disappointed we get because they forget to pick up the milk on the way home, or they forgot it’s our birthday next week, or they forget our anniversary or different things like that, and how much we get disappointed because someone doesn’t behave in a way that we expect them to. And so imagine if we could love people for exactly who they were and embrace them for that.

Now that doesn’t mean that you let them slip your best friend and throw out your crystals. You let them do what they want to do and you respect yourself and love yourself enough to guide your own path in what’s going to be right. But if you were to love people unconditionally in that way and give them the freedom rather than putting your expectations on them, imagine what freedom that would give you to actually be yourself because we spend our whole lives, you know, as young children, we’re told by our parents, good girl or good boy, bad boy, bad girl for different things. Until we go, oh, if I do this, I get love, and if I do that, I don’t get love. And we forget to actually be ourselves, and we get to that point in our lives when we go, hold on.

Who am I? And I think rose quartz could actually help to bring that gentle yet powerful energy in for a bit of unconditional love as well.

Nicholas: Yeah. I I have a mentor who often says that unconditional love doesn’t mean unconditional relationships, and we can love a person, a place, a thing, a phenomenon unconditionally and still not let it ruin our lives. And I actually see this embodied in rose quartz very well. I had a colleague who always called this the stone of tough love because, you know, if we really analyze, like, the geology, the chemistry, the morphology, everything about it is there is there is a kind of inherent toughness or sharpness in the stone. It is a trigonal mineral.

Those initiate change. It’s a fairly durable stone. When it forms in these massive anhedral forms, it’s, you know, pretty resilient. And yet it has this, like, really soft color. And even like, if we wanna look at the color through an astrological lens, if we break down pink into its components of, you know, arbitrarily white and and red, they’re they’re lunar, which is soft, receptive, and Martian, which is projective and forceful.

And we see this, like, kind of resilience and strength in this stone. It a stone that in like the Mesopotamian world was sometimes connected to some pretty ferocious deities, like lilith. So, like, it’s not always sweet and tender, except for when we need it to be. And I find it to be a really good stone for, like, softening our rigidity and stubbornness, but also preventing us from being over permeable to those outside forces. And I think it comes back to this idea of it is experiencing love as this cosmic phenomenon, which is the only sense in which it is truly, truly unconditional, universal, divine.

And if we get out of the way, if our ego self gets out of the way of that, then we can have that experience, and we can still not let other people take advantage of us.

Adam: Kyle, you’ve you’ve talked a little bit about, you know, there’s some new types of rose quartz coming out that are being discovered, lavender rose quartz, which has got that more purple hue, the blue rose quartz, which I love, and star rose quartz, which I’m actually wearing in my pendant at the moment. But actually, are there, do we need to be careful when we’re buying rose quartzes?

Ashley: We do. And I’m gonna tell you, if you’d asked me a couple of years ago, I would have said, you know, watch out for the common sort of enhancements that you might see. Sometimes really low quality rose quartz can be dyed pink. It’s easy to spot for the most part because the color will either be quite off and it will be noticeable. Or if you look at those natural little fissures and fractures and little cracks that you often see in a piece of rose quartz, you’ll see the dye that has accumulated in those cracks as a really bright pink, bright magenta, something like that.

This is most common in little stretchy bracelets, inexpensive costume jewelry, things of that nature where they’re really low quality stones. They’re gonna be really affordable. So just be careful when you’re out there purchasing, make sure that you’re buying from a reputable source. Now I would have told you a couple years ago that that would be the only thing you really had to look out for when it comes to rose quartz, but there are also a lot of those little same stretchy bracelets and things like that that are made of pink glass. Those can be a little harder to spot to the untrained eye, but they’ll be incredibly uniform.

They won’t really have that same depth and character of quality that a natural stone would have, and if you look at the edge, especially of little beads where the hole is drilled, often a glass bead will look just a little different than a stone bead, especially a nice hard durable stone, like Nicholas was mentioning that rose quartz is. The drill hole in a bead will usually be pretty clean, pretty crisp, and glass a lot of times when you see the inside it will be very white from where the glass was drilled out. So that’s something that you can sort of look for along with that uniformity and just being a little different than what you’d expect. But the most dubious of all of the enhancements that I’ve seen is artificially irradiated rose quartz. Now I just saw this for the first time.

I can’t remember if it was this past Tucson gem show in January, February of this year, 2024, or if it was last year. I think it was this year, but at my crystal shop, the store manager and I always go to shop for crystals. It is one of the biggest shows in the world. It’s amazing. And we were out shopping and she was looking at some crystals in one corner of the show.

I was in the other corner and she’s like, hey, come over here, shop with me. So I came over and she was showing me this beautiful black moonstone. Now, albeit, it was pretty dark in the tent that we were in, so forgive us that we did not catch this sooner. If I had been out in the sunlight, I have no doubt that I would have spotted this, but she picked out a few of these nice little towers of black moonstone from Madagascar. We got them back to the shop, and when we had the beautiful bright lights of the shop to make all of our crystals look so good and delicious and sparkly, I’m like, this is not black moonstone at all.

This is like irradiated smoky quartz. Like, what is this? And when I held it up to a really bright light, what was so interesting is that it had that dark exterior like an irradiated quartz would have to turn it that sort of smoky brown color, but the inside, you could see a core of pink. Because there is such an abundance of rose quartz in Madagascar, I think what’s happening is some of the vendors are just trying to have something different because all of them have rose quartz, and they wanna create these different products and do what they can do just like we see happen pretty much everywhere. Right?

I’m gonna cut my stuff into a different shape. I’m gonna coat it with Teflon. I’m gonna dye it. I’m gonna whatever. Just so that there’s some variety out there, which there’s, personally, there’s nothing wrong with as long as it’s disclosed and labeled and all that for people to know what they’re buying.

But these were not labeled. It was not disclosed that they were irradiated, but it was really interesting that when you held them up to a bright light, you could still see that pink core. And I’m like, they probably just took some of their lowest quality rose quartz, did a little irradiation to make it something different. They were probably trying to sell it as smoky quartz, wasn’t labeled at all. We thought it was the black moonstone because similar to, like, when Kyle was mentioning the, like, lavender rose quartz that has that sort of blue undertone, this had this sort of mystical cloudy foggy sort of interior that made it look like sort of a high quality black moonstone, again, in this very dark tent at the Tucson show.

But you do need to be sort of be careful when you’re out there making some purchases. Now there’s no doubt in my mind these never would have been, you know, labeled as rose quartz by the time they made it to a shop somewhere. They probably would have been labeled as smoky quartz, but just something good to know. And I would throw this question out to Nicholas and Kyle, if either of you know. I don’t know a ton about that process of the artificial irradiation.

I know it’s different in different places depending on exactly what they’re doing and what the enhancement is, but do either of you know why the core of these little carved towers would remain pink and that color would be more saturated on the outside? Any guesses?

Kyle: For me, my guess would be time, more than anything, not having the time in the radiation to actually have it go to the core. Because this actually ties into something that I had never seen up until this year was an irradiated lemon quartz sphere with asterism. So it has to be rose quartz that’s been irradiated because, otherwise, it won’t have the asterisk asterisk in it. I was, like, blown away. I’d never seen anything before.

And when you look at it, it has this kind of this is a bad example because it’s quite washed out. You can kinda see banding. There’s, like, white and clear patches, and that was very much how it looked. And it was now I put it all together. I had no idea just because of this conversation.

It’s like it has to be irradiated rose quartz. Nicholas, I’m happy to love it to hear yours.

Nicholas: Yeah. I was actually gonna to discuss this material that I started seeing more frequently on the market, especially on line sold as citrine with asterism or asterated citrine, and it is absolutely irradiated, massive quartz. Now whether it starts as rose quartz or if it starts as like the moon quartz, which is just desaturated rose quartz. Structurally, they derive their optical phenomena from the same source, which are those microscopic little nano fibers of de mortuary or a closely related borosilicate mineral. We’re not entirely sure, which is a fun mystery.

But, what’s probably happening is a 2 stage process with that. If it’s rose quartz, it’s getting blasted with the radiation, which darkens it, and then blasted with heat to lighten the color, which is, you know, like, how really fine topaz can be done or how, we can improve the the color of aquamarine, which gets irradiated and it turns at this muddy, murky brown green color, but then he treated afterwards. It lightens it to that deep crystal blue. And I think that’s happening with this lemon quartz or citrine with asterism too. I I nearly bought some, and I did a little bit of digging, and I was like, no.

This can’t be legit. And I finally found a thread somewhere on a mineral forum that confirmed the suspicion.

Adam: Now as we wrap up today, we’ve talked a lot about what rose quartz is good for and what it’s not good for. But I’d love to ask each of you, you know, people have rose quartz sitting around their house. How can they actually use it, do you think? And I’ll go first. You know, tying in with the beauty aspect of it, one of the things that is very popular, growing in popularity coming out of Asia is using a gua sha.

And I was actually you all flash in your rose quartz around. The piece of rose quartz I use the most is a gua sha, which is that, you know, interestingly shaped tool that we run along our face. It’s beautiful and cooling. It flows smooth, but it’s kind of bringing in that energy as well on a vibrational scale of that Aphrodite Venus beauty energy. So that could be a really nice way to bring rose quartz into your life.

What about yourself, Ashley? How do you tend to use rose quartz a lot?

Ashley: Okay. So this is a little bit weird, but this is what I’ve been doing lately. I make a gem water in the normal way, but I don’t drink it. I don’t ingest it. I actually add it to my watercolor paint water.

And if I’m needing to take some time to do some emotional expression, to kind of get in touch with whatever’s going on with me, I will just sit and free paint for a while using that rose quartz infused water. And it makes me feel so connected to the energy of that stone. And I love that as I’m kind of pouring my heart into this little painting, the rose quartz is actually helping me make it. All that energetically imbues water is right there. Nicholas, what about you?

Nicholas: So I will occasionally use rose quartz as a kind of, like, psychic shield. So I’ll I’ll I’ll usually have a physical piece to hold on to when I start the process, but I’ll visualize, like, this robust field of rose quartz surrounding me, roughly in the shape of my aura. I try to imagine it as, you know, more flexible than an actual rock would be. And, you know, as opposed to other ways that we might think of protection, this isn’t building a barrier that keeps everything out. It’s like a selectively permeable membrane.

Everything that passes through it has to be qualified by that energy of unconditional love. So if it doesn’t if if it doesn’t pass the test, it doesn’t get through. Whether it’s coming in or out, it also helps us when we wanna ensure that we bring the right vibes to the situation. And that can be really useful for, like, when days we’re just stretched real thin emotionally. We don’t have a lot left to give.

It just helps filter out maybe the things we shouldn’t be giving in place of love.

Kyle: I love that. I love that. And that makes sense to kind of how I work with it as well. So because I have chronic pain and I deal with it every day, my body is one of the things that I don’t love as much as I can and I have a love hate relationship and I specifically have a couple of these bodies and I will just remind myself that my body isn’t perfect, but it’s keeping all of my organs in place. It’s one of my favorite mantras, and it’s so simple, and it just works.

And it reminds me that, yes, I’m in a bit of pain, but it’s okay. Like, I’m here. I’m standing. It’s doing the job that I need it to do, and I don’t have to compare it to anyone else’s body.

Adam: Well, thank you very much for joining us this week on Crystal Concept. We can’t wait for you to join us next week when you see how well dressed the Australians are in theme for the crystal of the week. Feeding the Americans this week, I think we’ve both me and Kyle are now pink, but that’s okay. We’re not competitive. We won’t talk about the Olympics or something like that, but that’ll just be embarrassing.

But we will be back next week to dive deeply into another crystal. Thank you very much for joining us for the crystal content. Until next week. Blessed be.

Ashley: Bye. See you.

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