SUNSET PHANTOMS - HEmatite included quartz
It all starts with a phone call..
During the covid shutdown many businesses including our s had to shutter its doors. To make up for this, we did live feeds on Facebook and Instagram for a while. For these live feeds, a seller is always in search of new material for his limited online client base.
One of the materials I ended up selling was a spectacular hematite phantom quartz from India. I really enjoyed this material. We just had individual points of it, but the phantoms had this nice maroon effect from the partial oxidation of the hematite inside. Sometimes they were black and sparkly , unoxidized hematite. And some had the white and red maroon phantoms. Most tended to have some damage from the min. Ing procedure or the lack of care afterwards.
Although there are many Indian wholesalers, I have one that I've been dealing with for years and I was discussing this material with him.
And we called them " Sunset Phantoms "
At the same time I was discussing this material with my now partner Reanna DiGrigoli. I was thinking about buying larger quantities of this material and helping the miners take better care in the mining process as I had done this in other mines in the past.
Reanna encouraged me. She also thought it was a fabulous example of possibly the best phantom quartz on the market. We ordered a joint lot and then I started ordering consecutive lots. We decided we needed to name this. Fantastic material. We came up with the name "sunset phantom" due to the maroon orange yellow hues it displayed as clusters.
I worked with this mine for over 2 years. Trying to understand what their processes were when digging and cleaning and how their process could be improved to cause less damage to the material.
The result was not perfect but much less damage to the crystals and crystal clusters .During this time they had a couple close calls of the mine closing down until finally it was indeed officially closed.
We still retain a good amount of this material and are constantly working to trim and clean it for market.