dioptase

As a ground pigment, dioptase can be used in painting.

Additionally, dioptase is very fragile and specimens must be handled with great care.

Here tiny bluish-green dioptase is found on and in quartz.

Dioptase is also found in the deserts of the southwestern USA.

Dioptase is popular with mineral collectors and it is occasionally cut into small emerald-like gems.

Dioptase is an intense emerald-green to bluish-green copper cyclosilicate mineral.

A dioptase gemstone should never be exposed to ultrasonic cleaning or the fragile gem will shatter.

It appears at this occurrence, dioptase is primary and has crystallized with quartz, native copper, and malachite.

In addition, many small, pale-green colored crystals of dioptase have come from the Christmas Mine near Hayden, Arizona.

Tsumeb dioptase is wonderfully lustrous and transparent, with its crystal often perched on an attractive snow-white carbonate matrix.

Associated minerals include dioptase, fornacite, wulfenite, mimetite, cerussite and diaboleite.

Dioptase is an uncommon mineral found mostly in desert regions where it forms as a secondary mineral in the oxidized zone of copper sulfide mineral deposits.

However, the process of its formation is not simple, the oxidation of copper sulfides should be insufficient to crystallize dioptase as silica is normally minutely soluble in water except at highly alkaline pH.

It occurs in the oxidized zone of ore deposits and is associated with dioptase, wulfenite, hemihedrite, phoenicochroite, duftite, mimetite, shattuckite, chrysocolla, hemimorphite, willemite and fluorite.

However, in dry climates and with enough time, especially in areas of a mineral deposit where acids are buffered by carbonate, minute quantities of silica may react with dissolved copper forming dioptase and chrysocolla.

René Just Haüy (the famed French mineralogist) in 1797 determined that the enigmatic Altyn-Tyube mineral was new to science and named it dioptase (Greek, dia, "through" and optima, "vision"), alluding to the mineral's two cleavage directions that are visible inside unbroken crystals.