Cinnabar with Quartz

Blood red Cinnabar crystals to 5 mm are scattered over rich clusters of needle-like, colourless to milky white Quartz crystals on a light grey massive Quartz matrix. This Cinnabar, a mercury sulphide, is from the Nikitovka Hg Deposit in the Central Donbass of the Ukraine, an opencast mine which operated between 1885 and 1994. The Cinnabar forms many twinned translucent crystals with a metallic satin lustre and once backlit, become bright scarlet. A lovely miniature of twinned Cinnabar crystals on an aesthetic druse of acicular Quartz from the Nikitovka Mercury Deposit, Ukraine.