Sally spent forty years finding these.

The collection was our mother’s. She spent four decades at it — gem shows, estate sales, mineral dealers, occasional stones bought directly from the people who dug them out of the ground. She was not a dealer. She was a person who could not walk past a specimen table without stopping.

She chased the extraordinary. Alexandrite that shifts from forest green to raspberry red depending on the light. Black opal holding an entire spectrum inside a single stone. Tanzanite, moldavite, morganite, and a hundred-odd species in between — from dollar-box agates to pieces that belong behind glass.

What she left

When she died, the collection came to us, and we had a decision to make. We could have sold it as a lot. That would have been the efficient thing, and it would have meant these stones disappeared into somebody’s inventory list, unmeasured and unnamed.

So we photograph each one. We measure what can be measured — refractive index, specific gravity, hardness — and we write down what we know, including when we’re still confirming something. Every stone goes out with a card that says what it is. Nothing gets invented to make a listing read better.

Why it takes time

We’re not a manufacturer or a bulk importer, and there is no warehouse behind this. There is one collection, and stones leave it one at a time. New pieces get added weekly, and the good ones are genuinely one of one — when a stone sells, that stone is gone.

What we hope happens next

These stones were hers for forty years. We hope they’re as meaningful in your collection as they were in ours.