Earlier this month, Christie’s “Sculpted By Nature” auction culled £820,375 ($1.09 million) in total sales, making it the most successful online sale for the company’s natural history department, outperforming a similar sale it held in October 2019. Many of the lots sold for more than their top estimated value. Among the top crystal sellers were three different rounded Gogotte formations formed from quartz crystals and calcium carbonate in Fontainebleau, France. They took £37,500 apiece.
“I’ve seen ones selling for a hundred times what they were selling for 20 or 30 years ago,” Daniel Trinchillo, the founder and president of Fine Minerals International, told Business Jet Traveler in December. “I've seen collections worth 5 and 10 times what they cost 5 or 10 years earlier.”
From the Earth, Untouched
Mineral collecting became popular in the U.S. by the 1970s, when buyers began focusing more on how they looked than their scientific relevance. They are treasured as much for their beautiful hues as for their supposed healing benefits.
But if you believe the hype, some crystals are said to offer benefits perfectly in tune with the Covid-era anxiety: Ocean-blue azurite can assist in clairvoyance and intuition; sodalite obelisks allegedly encourage calm and rational thought; statuesque tourmaline pillars promote self-confidence; and polished, swirling agate is recommended by fans for rebalancing and cleansing.
The likes of calcite, quartz, and florite in myriad colors have become pieces of decor in hotels, cafes, and retail businesses. In the latest fashion campaigns for Celine, crystals show up in the brand’s Instagram ads as props for handbags and jewelry. At the Mandarin Oriental, they’re used in wine wands to help extrapolate tannins. The aptly named Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas held an exhibition earlier this year celebrating the role of crystals in culture.
“Acquiring crystals is a bit like acquiring art,” says Anthony James, an artist who showed his work at Crystal Bridges. “You’re forming a relationship.” James uses computer programming to mimic naturally forming crystals in a process he calls “organic digitization” of “polycrystalline shapes.” His unique pieces, which are the size of refrigerators and bigger, sell in the high six figures.
The first rule of shopping for crystals? Buy the best you can afford.
“It’s better to buy one really good piece than spend the same amount of money on five mediocre pieces,” Hyslop says. Specimens with richer, more vibrant colors without flaws are worth—and will cost—more than those with broken edges, weak coloration, and pockets of milky sediment.
And size matters, but only to a point.
“The prices rise according to size—to the point where you can’t pick up the crystal anymore—then they drop again because some of these items these are just too big,” says Hyslop. (You try moving 500 pounds of solid fluorite into your upper-level loft.) “It isn’t necessarily the price that would be the inhibitor. It’s the logistics of moving these things around.”