Fruit quartz

'Fruit Quartz' is a general trade term for a group of colorful, translucent materials which are individually known by fruit-like names such as "cherry quartz", "blueberry quartz", "strawberry quartz", "kiwi quartz", "pineapple quartz", and so on. They are commonly carved into jewelry components such as beads or pendants or into decorative objects.

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Despite the quartz part of their name, they are not natural stone despite sometimes being mistaken or miscalled as such. Instead, they are synthetic materials that are essentially a form of glass. An oddity of these synthetic fruit "quartzes" is that when closely examined, their colors are concentrated in the form of translucent or opaque inclusions within a transparent colorless matrix. Like goldstone, their production method precludes directly casting the material into small, detailed shapes, which must be created by physically carving them from larger blocks.

Although similar-looking (and unfortunately, similarly named) varieties of natural quartz do exist, they are comparatively very rare and expensive. The bright color of genuine strawberry quartz is accentuated by small seedlike inclusions of lepidocrocite and hematite. Genuine pineapple quartz comes from Antsirabe, Madagascar, and is a form of citrine with an unusual growth pattern of crystals around its sides similar to pineapple fruit. Blue quartz has inclusions of ilmenite.