Today I want to talk to you about Pantone’s Color of the Year and my crystal matchup for 2018. We’re talking ultraviolet crystals here… or more specifically, fluorescent crystals.

I started doing this Color of the Year Crystal matchup a few years ago… starting in 2013 with the color Emerald.  It’s always fun to do this; it allows me to get a little creative, digging around and finding a cool match up for it.

Here are the links to the past five years in case you’d like to check those out too:

• Emerald: Color of the Year 2013
• Radiant Orchid: Color of the Year 2014
• Marsala: Color of the Year 2015
• Serenity and Rose Quartz: Color of the Year 2016
• Greenery: Color of the Year 2017

Ultraviolet Crystals …That’s a Color?

Pantone’s color choice for 2018 is the color “Ultraviolet”.  And I put that in quotes because ultraviolet ain’t no color. It’s technically a particular type of frequency on the electromagnetic spectrum, just beyond and slightly higher frequency than the visible light spectrum. Of course, leave it to me to get geeky about it, but it’s not really a color. 😉

However, Pantone has interpreted it as a color, as most people probably do, because of the word “violet” being included in “ultraviolet”, as a VIOLET-PURPLEY color.

 

I just want to share a little bit of their specific description:

“We are living in a time that requires inventiveness and imagination. It is this kind of creative inspiration that is indigenous to Pantone UltraViolet, a blue-based purple that takes our awareness and potential to a higher level.”

Do you sense and feel the mysticism that they’re pulling into this description here?

This goes along with the whole idea of mysticism, spirituality, and crystals, and how they all kind of interplay with each other. It seems to be a popular trend for 2018 and Pantone jumped on the bandwagon, or maybe they helped spur the bandwagon forward. Anyhow, they present Ultraviolet very cosmically, don’t they?

Well, spirituality, mysticism, crystals all of it; this is the stuff we’ve been talking about for years! What we love and talk about has hit the mainstream now, full force, in 2018. And here it is now represented in the Color of the Year.

My Crystal Pick

Instead of going for… well, I was going to say “a literal translation of ultraviolet” (but as I said, it isn’t a translation of the color ultraviolet because there’s no such thing)… I’m going to go to the scientific explanation of what ultraviolet technically is and chose the minerals and crystals that actually, physically have the capacity to glow under ultraviolet light; the fluorescent specimens.

How about that? So let’s get into it!

Fluorescent Crystals

Some minerals actually have the characteristic of being fluorescent under ultraviolet light.

Click here for a list of many fluorescent crystals.

Out of approximately 4500 minerals that we know of on planet Earth, about 500 of them have this characteristic. This characteristic is actually a really useful one for easily identifying minerals from others that closely resemble them.

Sir George Stokes was the physicist and mathematician who first realized that some minerals have the ability to fluoresce under ultraviolet light.  He first discovered it with the mineral fluorite, which he noted was actually able to glow; emit this powerful vibrancy under ultraviolet light. So, he called this characteristic; the ability for a mineral to do this, “fluorescence”, naming it after the mineral he first noted it in.

He then tested many others and realized that fluorite wasn’t the only mineral that could do this.

It’s amazing to see these minerals that do have this property of fluorescence, to glow under ultraviolet light. They look completely different from how they look under regular light to our eyes!

The Science

There are actually different wavelengths of ultraviolet light:

• shortwave
• medium-wave
• long-wave

All of these waves are a higher frequency than visible light wavelengths, so just a step above the colors that we can see on the electromagnetic spectrum.

These higher-frequency waves are just outside of what we’re able to detect and measure with our eyes. But we can measure and see their effects on certain minerals; the ones that fluoresce. What might appear as a dull, gray rock might actually vibrantly glow in all kinds of beautiful, bright, vibrant colors under ultraviolet light.

 

You might remember back in science class when you started learning about chemistry. What happens is the ultraviolet frequency will cause some electrons in some of the electron shells of the atoms that make up the mineral to temporarily gather up some extra energy from the ultraviolet higher frequency. They’ll actually jump up to the next higher electron shell… and then fall back down.

Quantum Sidebar:

When an electron in an atom has either increased or decreased in energy, it jumps electron shells within the atom (we call that a “quantum leap”). That certain amount of energy can be described as a literal “little bundle of energy” — no matter, just energy. Now, it’s that actual teeny-tiny bundle of electromagnetic energy that we call a “quantum” aka a photon of light. EM energy = light…one and the same.

When the electron falls back to its original electron shell, it actually leaves behind an energetic imprint.

Remember that energy can never be created nor destroyed, only transformed from one form to another; AKA First Law of Thermodynamics AKA Law of Conservation fo Energy!

So, as already mentioned, that atom leaves behind some energy in that higher electron shell. Some of that leftover energy is what’s actually giving off this light that we’re able to see! Pretty cool, right?

Also, the different wavelengths of ultraviolet, the short, the medium, or the long-waves will affect minerals differently as far as what colors they fluoresce. The reason is that the various wavelengths will cause different electrons to excite in different ways.

If you have a UV light or black light you can witness this for yourself.

A Metaphysical Side to This?

I do feel that there’s a special energetic property inherent to minerals that fluoresce under ultraviolet light that we can tap into on a metaphysical level because they possess this special characteristic that not all minerals do.

What do you think?

I encourage you to start working with fluorescent crystals and see if you notice any unique metaphysical properties about these minerals because I would like to share that in our community and see if we can collectively come up with some meaningful data on that.

Let’s experience this together and see what we can come up with. Please jump in and share your findings or comments below.

Crystal Blessings,