Choosing your first stone when you know nothing about it

People often ask me, always with the same awkwardness: where do I start? As though there were a right answer, and a risk of getting it wrong.

There isn't one. Here instead is what I wish someone had told me.

Take the one that draws you

It is the most ordinary advice and the only one that holds. You will look at thirty photographs, and two or three will catch your eye without your knowing why. Take those.

The correspondence lists — this stone for that thing — come from real traditions, but they cheerfully contradict each other from one book to the next. The same amethyst will be called calming here, stimulating there. If you are starting out, those lists will confuse you more than they help you.

Look at the form before the variety

It is what changes day-to-day use the most.

• A small tumbled or rough stone slips into a pocket. It is the one you touch absent-mindedly on the train.
• A sphere does not travel. You set it down, and the light turns on it with no edge to interrupt.
• A point or a tower stands on its own. It is an object for furniture, not for a pocket.
• A geode is a display piece. Often the most expensive, always the most cumbersome.

If you are unsure: start small and rough. It is the cheapest format, the closest to the original mineral, and the one people keep longest.

Three forgiving stones

Not because they would do anything, but because they are solid, common, and rarely disappointing on arrival.

Clear quartz. Transparent to milky, very hard, it fears neither water nor light. It is the easiest stone to live with.

Amethyst. The purple varies enormously from one piece to another, from almost colorless to deep. Be careful: it fades in direct sun. Do not set it on a south-facing windowsill.

Rose quartz. Often milky, sometimes crossed by internal fractures that catch the light. Those fractures are not a flaw.

What to avoid at the start

Selenite, however beautiful it is. It scratches with a fingernail and breaks down in water. I ruined two before anyone warned me. Superb, but not for a first stone.

Stones in impossible colors. An electric blue, a fluorescent pink, an apple green: it is almost always a dyed or heated stone. That is not illegal when it is declared — it is when it is not.

What you receive will not be the photograph

This has to be said plainly, because it is the first possible disappointment.

A natural stone varies. The shade, the veining, the inclusions, the dimensions to the millimeter: none of that is reproducible from one example to the next. The photograph shows one example, not yours.

That is what makes no two pieces identical. But if the difference disappoints you, you have fourteen days to change your mind, without having to give a reason.

One last thing

A stone does not heal. It attracts neither money nor love, and it will never replace a doctor. What you are buying is an object of material, carrying old stories that I tell you as stories.

That is not nothing. But that is all it is.

If you are still hesitating, write to me. I will answer without trying to sell you anything.