Calcite

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Mineral guide

Learn about Calcite

diverse shapes, colors, and optical quirks; widely available yet scarce elite pieces from Elmwood and Charcas drive collecting value and display.

Regional guide

Calcite from Charcas, Mexico

Charcas calcite is one of the great immediately recognizable Mexican calcite styles: flattened, sharply hexagonal rhombohedra stacked like a pile of white-to-gray poker chips, often with satiny or pearly broad faces and glassier edge faces. Good examples have a sculptural, almost architectural quality — single fat disks, stepped stacks, V-shaped clusters, columnar growths, or matrix-free “floaters” that seem too deliberate to be accidental. The classic palette is colorless, white, cream, gray, slightly smoky, and occasionally pinkish; many specimens show a pink to red fluorescence that is part of the locality’s appeal for UV collectors.