Show notes
Join Adam Barralet, Ashley Leavy, Kyle Perez, and Nicholas Pearson in Episode #3 of the Crystal Confab Podcast as they explore Angel Aura Quartz meaning and uses, including:
Raising energy with Aura Quartz
Historic notes about aura-like glazes
Coatings for Quartz in ancient Nubia
Working with Angel Aura Quartz for the Full Moon in Aries
Tune in now and dive into the magical world of Angel Aura Quartz!
Podcast Episode Transcript:
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: When it comes to man made crystals, for me, they just don't feel right. Things like gold stone, that glassy opalite, and dyeing different things like agates and halites. However, there is one family of crystals that I will make an exception to because the power and potentiality of these crystal is absolutely amazing. These are the aura quartzes. And today, we're gonna dive into one of my favorites.
It's known as angel aura quartz. So welcome to crystal confab where we dive in and have a bit of a special informal chat about one of the crystals we love and we hope you love too. Joining me today, of course, is Kyle and Nicholas. How are you today, gents? Doing well.
Kyle Perez: Doing well. Thank you.
Adam: Beautiful. Now I wanna start off by kind of really clarifying, you know, I've got my favorite angel aura quartz. It's actually a Lemurian seed angel aura quartz here. But, Nicholas, I remember seeing on your Instagram, I don't know how long ago it was now, you did this amazing explanation because when I first started collecting crystals, there was only one type of aura quartz. And, obviously, the different metals that you fuse together, you get all the different colors of the rainbow. But as time's gone on, I've noticed there's different other kind of ones.
And many times even buying online, I've got disappointed with what's actually wrapped up. It's not what I believe to be a true aura quartz. But can you run us through what the aura quartz is that?
Nicholas Pearson: Yeah. Absolutely. So in the late nineties, there was a scientist in the Pacific Northwest here in the United States who came up with this process of applying a really thin, like, microns thick, layer of precious metals to the outside of quartz, and later they did it to some other materials as well. And, the first experiments were done with gold, which produced that, you know, beautiful kind of aquamarine blue color, and they were kind of iridescent. And so they nicknamed that aqua aura.
And over time, they, you know, tried some other things out with different metals, and that produced things like our rainbow aura, titanium aura, the angel aura that we'll be discussing tonight. And it was a pretty closely guarded secret. The way of applying that metal to the outside, is a process that goes by 2 different names. It's called precious metal anodization, where they're, you know, vaporized. It's also called vapor deposition, and you have to superheat the quartz in a vacuum chamber under intense pressure, to allow those metals to become a gas, like the air we breathe.
And the quartz in that environment also generates a tiny electrical charge, thanks to its piezo electricity. And that that kind of calls, if you will, the metals to it to make that permanent layer on the surface. And it's a very, very thin layer, but it is permanent, unless you're gonna, you know, take it to a, you know, bit of lapidary equipment, you're not gonna sand it off. And that was pretty much it. And while I imagine there are some other folks who figured out how to do this in some other parts of the world, in the, you know, last I mean, certainly in the last 10 years, but in more recent years, we've seen kind of this explosion of aura like materials being sold.
The kind of second generation of them are done through a process called electroplating, where you put whatever it is you want to electroplate in a solution that has salts of usually some kind of metal. It's almost always titanium with these guys. And you run an electrical charge to that. You have 2 little diodes, a diode and anode, and it, you know, runs this current through the solution, which breaks apart the components of the salts. Some of them become neutral, and some of them migrate.
In the case of the metal, the metallic bases migrate to the surface of the quartz. And you get wildly different kind of degrees of quality in these. Sometimes you get a really nice even coating, they had to turn the stones partway through to do that. Other times you can see, like, the metal grating imprints on the bottom where they didn't turn them. Sometimes there will be bald spots in them.
If it's a thick enough coating, it's pretty permanent. If it's not, it can rub off. And this is far less costly than making the kind of precious metal analogs using the vapor deposition process. So you can make a lot more material for a lot less expensive, but no matter what color it is, it's almost always done with titanium. So the so called called aqua aura Quartzes that's made with the 2nd generation process still colored by titanium and not gold.
Same with our angel aura not coming from things like platinum. It's always almost always going to be titanium. And then, a few years after that, we see an entirely different substance on the market being called aqua aura quartz, or aura quartz kind of broadly speaking, and it doesn't use metals at all. The crystals, get dyed first to produce the kind of undercoat of color, and then they're sprayed with synthetic things like Teflon and other polymers to produce the iridescence on the outside. Sometimes these scrape off really easily.
Sometimes when you pull the price tag off of them, the color comes with it. So, you know, these can have any number of chemicals applied to them. We don't necessarily know because not every treatment facility is doing the same thing. As they're spraying them, there's lots of runoff, so it can't be good for the workers involved. It's gotta, you know, have some environmental implications as well.
So, you know, it's not truly aura quartz anymore at that point, I think.
Adam: It would just really be quartz with some stuff sprayed on it, really, and artificial stuff. And that's similar to what I was talking about before about injecting dye into agates and things like that. Wouldn't it?
Nicholas: Absolutely. And, you know, at the end of the day, people can collect whatever they wanna collect, whatever they're called to, whatever they find beautiful. Beauty itself is therapeutic. But if, you know, we're coming at it from the, you know, traditionally, but still modern, practice of, crystal healing. I just don't see how something that's coated in resin or plastic or some other polymer is gonna hold up.
Those are insulative kinds of materials, and I just feel like it's going to prevent the quartz from doing all the things we hope quartz is gonna do in our life.
Adam: Now I know Ashley did this amazing experiment where she actually got, the clear quartz and the metals that were made to make these different, aura quartz of all the different colors, and we'd check the energy freak, the energy field of them. And then she'd compare that to the, to the actual aura quartz. And she found each time that the aura quartz almost doubled in its energy field. So this first type is I love them for amplifying just their own properties. We, you know, we often forget that metals themselves are crystals.
They're just a crystal made of a single element, so they have their own potentiality. And we know that clear quartz amplifies all other quart all other crystals. So I love this first type. Nicholas, how do you feel about the second type?
Nicholas: You know, I think as long as we're okay with titanium being the element involved, we're not over romanticizing something as containing an element on the periodic table it doesn't have, I don't see why we can't appreciate it. The coatings are quite a bit thicker than they're going to be on the 1st generation material. And they're often quite a bit more uneven. So, you know, we might need to bear in mind that they require a little extra care, and, you know, any number of other things can be introduced to them to also produce some of those colors. So it's not going to be a single pure element from the periodic table.
It's not just gold or just platinum or just titanium. It's gonna be a range of other stuff to produce that iridescence. And, you know, at the end of the day, there's still runoff from those, you know, chemical salt baths they have to go in, and, you know, we have to contemplate, like, how how well is that being disposed of, and, you know, how much care is given to the folks who have to deal with those caustic solutions.
Adam: I don't know if you've got any insider information that you can share with us, but the type 1, does seem to be a bit of a protected, you know, like you said, process. And it does seem to be that finding that type 1 aura quartz is getting really, really challenging and difficult. Do you know what's happening in that realm?
Nicholas: So far as I know, the guy who mentioned the process is still making it. I'm not entirely clear whether other folks have cracked the code. I've heard rumors, but, and because a lot of this stuff happens so far up the supply chain that if you're even just a couple rungs removed at, you know, giant trade shows, It's all a kind of oral tradition, if you will. You know, it's all hearsay. It's all anecdotal stuff.
So it's hard to verify those things that we hear, at those kinds of events. So I've heard, that the process has been copied in China,
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