In some – not all – cases I have found that the lighter ones have a higher vibration. Some of the amethyst and some citrine have been heat treated to darken their color.

Agree!!! my Thou I look longingly at stones when I sit them in the sun, wondering how much color is gone forever this time, they have never changed their power, and as I use all elements regularly to keep their energies vibrant and abundant I could never trade keeping some color for the power generated by the sun charging.
Thou I do feel they are often mor specifically purposed after wards, asthou the charging hones it in on certain abilities, eg: if you took a crystal & split it in half, charged one in the sun and one in the moon & then presented them to an unknowing person and asked if there were a different energy and/or what each piece should be used for or which would be better for a specific intention, I am sure they would reflect different potency

=)

I’m annoyed with myself for leaving the crystals in the sun, one was a real blue teal and the other a deep amethyst, both faded to grey! It was their colours that attracted me? X

Can the colour be restored? I know it fades, and would like the colour back if possible. Thank you

Hi all,

Physics major here. Just want to correct some (easily addressed) misconceptions from this article. I just think scientific literacy is very important, and, even though I find it hard to believe that crystals have any health benefits, I think it’s still my responsibility to explain how simple physical properties emerge.

The central issue with the explanation for photo-degradation in this article is a misunderstanding of what “color” in physics means. This is understandable. Physical color theory (quantum chromodynamics) has nothing to do with what we see as color. A quark with a “red color charge” is not actually red. It’s just a place-holder term for a fundamental property of the particle. Like, how electrons are negatively charged. Physicists are known to do this: different particles have different “flavors,” others have different “spins.” These have nothing to do with how the particles taste, or how the particle spins like a top. Physicists here have stolen common language to name properties of particles that come from the math of physics. “Colors” could just as easily be replaced by letters or hieroglyphics or fruit. There just happen to be three “color charges,” and so “red”, “green”, and “blue” worked well, and then it sorta stuck. Leading to years of confusion.

So, what is happening when you see the color blue? Well, light has different frequencies. It’s like a wave. Imagine a ripple in a pool. If the ripples are closer together, the frequency is higher (or faster). If the ripples are further apart, the frequency is lower (or slower). Just imagine a detector on the edge of the pool that can detect the “frequency” of high points on the ripple. More ripples per second, higher frequency.

Light is the same way. Every photon (or “particle” of light—imagine a packet with a little wiggling string inside. Not a great visualization, but it will work for our purposes) has a certain “ripple per second” number, or frequency. And, when these packets of light strike an object, the object absorbs the light, and is energized by it (the energy of the photon needs to go somewhere). Sometimes the object, or the atom, releases this energy. But it can only shoot out photons of certain frequencies.

This is getting into quantum mechanics, and is a little challenging to explain more rigorously than this. A great, but outdated and terribly inaccurate, model of the atom provides some intuition. Basically, you can think of electrons as orbiting the center of the atom, and every time an electron is struck by a photon, it jumps up to a larger orbit. This makes the atom energized. This is where the energy went to, pushing the electron further out. But, the electron can only exist in orbits of certain sizes. When the electron jumps back down (meaning that the energy is released), the energy of the released photon has to correspond to the scale of that jump. And, since the electron can only fall down to particular orbits, of particular energies, the released photons can only have certain energies. Or, more precisely, certain _frequencies_ (the energy of the photon is related to the frequency. You need to put more energy into the pool to generate more ripples). So, that means that blue objects are blue because they’re made of atoms and molecules that, when energized, reemit light with a higher frequency. Light with a lower frequency is red. Green is somewhere in the middle.

And, even these color names, they’re shorthand for how our eyes process the absorption of light. We have different cells in our eyes that get “excited” when they are hit by light. Depending on the type of cell, they’ll give more of a reaction if they absorb higher frequency light. Our brains then do a lot of really complicated math to say that if this more red-sensitive cell was energized 50%, and this more green-sensitive cell was energized 27%, the color is probably orange-ish. I really recommend, if you are up to it, reading about fourier analysis. It’s very beautiful. It’s very math heavy, but it’s essentially what our brains and eyes are doing when we see a mess of light, of weird frequencies. Or sound too, for that matter.

Physics is really gorgeous. And, I’ve only really scraped the surface of all this. I hope you read through all of it. There’s a lot more to study, though. Light as an electromagnetic wave through an abstract mathematical field that permeates all of space. How the equations that described the propagation of light through medium-less space naturally gave rose to Special Relativity, and then General Relativity, with all its weirdness and time travel and stretching and squeezing of space. Or how, looking at how light was emitted and absorbed by objects, we realized that everything in nature is stepped, or “quantized.” That, there are only certain possible energy values, and position values, and time values, everything is discrete if you zoom in close enough, nothing is continuous. And, that led to particle physics and quantum electrodynamics, and dirac’s equations, and antimatter, and quantum field theory, and all the other buzz words in modern physics.

The author of this article wrote that “I think we can… agree that physics is just barely understood, & quite precariously at best, that the ‘laws’ seem to breaking down, & new understandings are coming to light more and more.” And, I completely agree with her. But, that’s precisely the point! It’s all very exciting that we don’t know anything! And, more to the point, just because we _could_ be wrong doesn’t mean we should mindlessly speculate on inaccurate interpretations of the physical world. We’ve been working on this physics thing for 400+ years, and millions of people have dedicated their lives to the endeavor. And, just because we have only scratched the surface does not mean that these aren’t the best ideas that us humans have ever had. It’s entirely within everyone’s ability to contribute to these ideas, but it’s _hard_. It takes years of dedication, and those new ideas still need to be double and triple and quadruple checked by thousands of other people who have also spent their lives dedicated to contributing ideas.

Anywho, hope that this was intriguing to some of you,
Felix