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Spinel - Spinel Law Twin Display
Based on a specimen from Luc Yen Mine, Yen Bai Province, Vietnam.
I love the idea of displaying a mineral inside a box or case that’s a matching crystal model. It seems like a perfect way to show off a specimen with particularly good form, and present an impressive or surprising specimen in a unique way. This twinned spinel specimen isn’t perfectly smooth or gemmy like some smaller crystals in my collection, but its large size made it the perfect candidate for a custom display.
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Spinel Pair
Based on specimens from Russia and Canada
At the 2023 East Coast show in Springfield MA, I was delighted to find two complex spinel crystal specimens from two different dealers. One, from Siberia, was large, sharp, and highly symmetrical like something out of a textbook. The other, from Baffin Island, Canada, was a pleasing shade of dark blue but distorted in a way that made its jumble of faces difficult to sort out. I bought them both, but upon further investigation in my hotel room that evening I was disappointed to find that both crystals were bounded by the exact same forms! Although I was initially grumpy about the coincidence, I eventually realized that models of these crystals would make a very nice pair. The completed set makes the similarities between these two seemingly very different crystals readily apparent.