Join Adam Barralet, Ashley Leavy, Kyle Perez, and Nicholas Pearson in Episode #6 of the Crystal Confab Podcast as they explore Rose Quartz' meaning and uses, including:
Is Rose Quartz actually the ultimate "stone of love"?
Spotting Rose Quartz crystal fakes
Rose Quartz for grief & loss
Working with Rose Quartz at Beltane
Rose Quartz for fresh starts
Tune in now for a deeper look at Rose Quartz' meaning!
Crystal Confab Podcast Introduction: Are you just starting with crystals? Or maybe you have a whole collection but aren't sure how to use them? Join 4 crystal nerds, healers, workers, and lovers for crystal confab, a casual chat about all things crystals.
Adam Barralet: Hello, and welcome to this week's episode of crystal confab. Today, we're looking at the crystal of love, or are we? I've got a bit of an issue, to be honest with Rose Quartz. I feel it's a bit like the Kardashians. It gets far more attention than it deserves because there are so many beautiful, loving crystals out there.
But whenever people are talking about love, they go straight to Rose Quartz. So today, me and my gang, we're gonna kind of unpack rose quartz. What it's good for, what maybe another crystal might be good for, and maybe throw in some surprise uses for this crystal as well. How are we today, guys?
Ashley Leavy: Oh, good. Good.
Adam: Good. Good. Now, Nicholas, I wanna start with you today. Tell us a little bit, rose quartz, it's counted as the crystal of love, but where did that come from? And do you think that's all we can use rose quartz for, love?
Nicholas Pearson: Oh, I'm so glad you asked. This is like my nerdy superpower is, like, tracking down where these, like, little epithets and things come from in our world. And, just casually over the years, I noticed that, like, before a certain point, nobody really makes a strong connection between Rose Quartz and Love. There might be a little kind of anecdotal stuff here or there, but it's about from the year 1985 onwards, and it's really, like, more frequent in the late eighties, early nineties that we start to see rose quartz called the love stone pretty universally. So, at some point in the last couple years, I decided to, like, intentionally do a deep dive on this.
I was writing some new curriculum centered around rose quartz. I was like, let's actually find out where this comes from. And to the best of my knowledge, and I could be wrong, I I would love a larger dataset than I've got, but it's already pretty big. The first time we see rose quartz called the love stone is in, like, one of those classic late eighties books called, Crystal Awareness by Kathryn Bowman, where she just gives it, among other things, she calls it the love stone. However, what happened 1 year later would really cement this.
And there's a kind of obscure book by today's standards, but this author was, at least at this point, quite popular. Her name is Connie Church. She released a couple of books. Crystal Clear, which, if you bought it in the eighties, originally came, like, shrink wrapped with a clear quartz crystal to go along with it. So you could do all of the exercises in tandem with the crystal.
And then as a sequel in, 87, so just 2 years after Catherine Bowman books Catherine Bowman's first book comes out, she puts out a book called Crystal Love. And, of course, it also comes shrink wrapped with a little piece of rose quartz. And throughout the book, she's constantly referring to this stone as your love stone. Not saying all rose quartz is the love stone, but all the self love exercises you're gonna do are with this stone, which is now your love stone. It theoretically could have been anything, but she wrote the book about rose quartz, and that's why it really just kind of became cemented in our collected psyche as the stone of love.
And, I think I think that is a really nice entryway to talking about what rose quartz can do for us, but I kinda have, like, this vendetta against getting too prescriptive and reductionist about crystals. If I asked any human being to summarize their entire life in one word, they're obviously going to miss most of who they are. You know, I could say that I am a writer, but I also wear a lot of other hats. So rose quartz, of course, is a love stone, but it does so many other things. If we look earlier in history, we start to see that, you know, in more recent history, at least, it's definitely associated with things like emotional well-being, we'll say psychological healing, and, like, really broad strokes, which isn't too far a cry to being a love stone.
But, you know, the farther back in history we go, we start to see that there's actually some pretty interesting connections to rose quartz. Some of the earliest evidence that we've got of its use goes back about 9000 years ago. In what is now modern day Iraq, we've got evidence of some carvings, things like cylinder seals and beads and a few other stuff. Here in the Americas, we find, like, pre Columbian artifacts, indigenous artifacts that are mostly blades carved from it, which feels like a pretty unloving application for this stone. We've got a few references in, like, let's say, late antiquity, early kind of classical period to stones that we think could have been rose quartz, but, you know, they weren't classified as a variety of quartz because that's not how I mean, geology wasn't a science yet, and that's not really how stones were cataloged then.
So we suspect that there might be a few evidences of this stone really being used in healing, but it wouldn't be until the rebirth of the modern crystal movement that we start to see it, like, used in full force. And, you know, by this point, I think one of, like, my favorite discussions of the activity of rose quartz comes from the writings of Michael Katz, and formerly Ginny Katz, now Isabelle Morton. But…and they…really together in those early writings that they did, like gifts of the gemstone guardians, which is now Wisdom of the Gemstone Guardians, they describe this, like, fourfold activity that comes from working with the energy of rose quartz. And there it's all kind of centered around this idea of helping us deal with our unexpressed emotions. It's a stone of emotional healing, but it's not just, like, focused on bad things.
You know, we tend to in our, you know, modern kind of broader community of energy healing, holistic healing, we tend to focus on resolving the stuff we don't like, the stuff we don't want. But rose quartz doesn't make a strong dichotomy between good and bad. It's about expressed versus unexpressed. So it stirs hidden emotions to help them become more accessible. It helps us really sit with them and acknowledge whatever they might be.
That's gonna lead us to a state of understanding of what those emotions are and where they come from. And from there, we have the emotional wherewithal to be able to communicate or express them more effectively and authentically. And we can note that, sure, that could be sadness or pain or loneliness, but it could also be joy. Like, how many times have we just had a wonderful day and then come upon a situation where it's not really appropriate to share that joy? So we, like, bottle it up for later, and then we forget it's there, and it, you know, goes sour on the shelf.
So, this is gonna help us really kinda broaden what rose quartz can do for us. Now among all of the emotions that could be unexpressed are love. And I think that's why we really think of it as a love stone today because if our emotional body, if our psyche is so gummed up with other things that are clogging the pipes, there's no space for love to flow either. And this takes us into that space of, like, love as a cosmic force, not love as an emotion. Love as a cosmic force, the glue that holds the universe together.
Like, it can't flow through us if we are clogged. So by expressing, by revealing, acknowledging, integrating, whatever other emotional stuff is there, there's a room for that kind of cosmic energy of love to flow through us. And that is what allows rose quartz to be a love stone, in my opinion. It's not like a romance specific stone. We can apply it there, but that's not its sole function.
Ashley: I would love to jump in with kind of a personal story that I think really illustrates what Nicholas is talking about. So for years, for the first many years that I was working with crystals, I was not at all attracted to rose quartz. I mean, my immediate judgment of rose quartz was, like, boring. You know, I'm not interested. I don't really care.
I don't get what the big deal is. I don't understand why people like this crystal. I never ever ever felt called to it or drawn to it until I really started doing a lot of work to bypass or to work through a lot of the spiritual bypassing that we see in the wellness space, in the healing arts community. So often we wanna just, like, gloss over the things that are difficult, that are challenging, that make us uncomfortable. And, you know, we have this way in the wellness community of framing everything in a way that truly can be a little bit toxic.
And it wasn't until I started to recognize and acknowledge that that rose quartz really called me in in a big way because, like Nicholas said, you know, it really helps us get in touch with some of those emotions that we haven't wanted to recognize. And so it allowed me to get in touch with those things, to feel those things, to be in that discomfort while offering me this, like, unconditional support and love and making me feel so loved as I worked through some really hard and really heavy stuff. And that relationship sort of kind of was going in the background, and I didn't really realize at the time that that's what was happening. It wasn't until later that I sort of put that together. But a little while into this process,
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