hair stone

Definitions

Clear quartz crystal containing coloured filaments caused by impurities. Particular kinds are sometimes known as Venus’s hair stone or Thetis’s hair stone

countable, uncountable

Examples

“In some aggregates of quartz and shorl, slender capilliform needles of red shorl traverse the quartz, and cross each other in various directions. This stone is in some estimation, and is by the Germans called hairstone. It is found in Siberia.”

“This goldenhair might be compared, or is perhaps the same, with the Venus hairstone; which is quartz traversed by such acicular crystals of the red oxide of titanium.”

““Venus's-hair stone,” rock-crystal banded with pearly filaments of amianthus; “Cupid's pencils,” a violet quartz enveloping separate⟳ little tufts of hair-like oxide of iron⟳, of a bright golden brown; “marmot's-hair stone,” not unlike the preceding, yet with a difference, the oxide of titanium, which makes the little marmot's hairs, being disposed in long tress-like filaments, and not in tufts…”

CEFR level