Most of the time we don't hit that big score. We come home tired and happy with whatever it was we did find, or we console ourselves on not finding anything this time but next time we certainly will. Sometimes, of course, we do find something really fantastic, like that big brick of agate-veined red jasper I dug out of the ground at Brenda, Arizona or this agate nodule my husband picked up at Saddle Mountain, Arizona. We were leaving the site, turning onto the road to head home, and he saw it out the truck window. It was just perched on the top of the gravel heaped up by the road grader.
And yes, that's in inches. It's almost 8 inches (20 cm) long and weighs well over 2 pounds. The outer part is banded agate with a solid, not hollow, crystal center.
When we find it ourselves, we pretty much know it's the real thing, even if we don't know what real thing it is!
Iron pyrite, commonly called fool's gold, is just one of the many natural "fakes" we may find, and probably the best-known. It's not gold, of course, though it's metallic and shiny and kind of golden in color. Mother Nature has fooled a lot of fools into thinking they'd scooped up a fortune when all they really had was a scoop of iron sulfide, also known as pyrite. Some of those fools have then turned the trick on others, or at least tried to.
That's not to say iron pyrite is without value just because it's not gold. Did you know marcasite jewelry, popular especially during the Victorian era but still made today, uses faceted iron pyrite for its glitter? Although there is a mineral called marcasite that is also an iron sulfide like pyrite, its crystal structure makes it unsuitable for faceting. So in steps iron pyrite, fool's gold, to fool us once again!
Pyrite itself, of course, can be pretty enough on its own to be collectible. This is a fist-sized chunk I purchased for an absurdly small sum at one of the Quartzsite shows several years ago.
This smaller piece -- it's about the size of a U.S. quarter -- is from a bag of rocks I purchased at Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry on a school field trip when I was in fifth grade. (Yes, I'm a hoarder. Yes, I really do remember buying that bag of rocks on our fifth grade field trip.)
The location of Navajún, Spain, produces exquisite cubic crystals of iron pyrite. The specimen pictured below was a gift to me from Rob, the son-in-law of my dear friends Jan and Alida from the Netherlands. The pyrite crystals from Navajún are so bright and shiny that you can easily see the wood grain of my table reflected in the lower face of the leftmost crystal in this sample. These crystals have not been polished in any way; they're still in the matrix in which they formed.
Pyrite occurs with other minerals. It's what gives this brilliant blue lapis lazuli its glitter.
But iron pyrite still isn't gold. When it's identified correctly and used correctly, collected and bought and sold as what it really is, it's not a fake and it's not a fraud. The people who claim it's something else are the fakes and frauds. Sadly, there are a lot of those people in the rock/gem/mineral businesses. Even though most of us are up front and honest about what we do, there are enough bad eggs out there to give us all a bad name.
What can you do to protect yourself against fakes and frauds? The best way is to educate yourself. You'll not only learn which rocks and minerals are the real thing, but you'll also learn which people to trust and which not to.
Fool's gold is one of those frauds most of us encountered at a very young age, and it's been around a lot longer than all of us. There are new frauds, new fakes, new scams cropping up just about every day. Some of them are really almost laughable, but others are very pretty and like iron pyrite need to be appreciated for what they are rather than for what someone is trying to make them be.
