Hi Littlestone,

<i>Fluorite as a pigment is a new one on me; do you have any more info on that - sounds interesting.</i>

It was just a guess, I have a large non-crystalline dark lump of fluorite which I photographed this afternoon for something entirely different. It's strongly pigmented, a lot darker in reality than in the photo, softish, easily available and I was musing aloud about it being a pigment candidate, rather than having any direct knowledge aside from minerals being ground up and used.

Have a look at this, you'll need the Crystals album, last photograph, sorry, can't do a direct link and compared to the other folks on this site, I'm really not a good photographer.

http://community.webshots.com/user/runemage

The pink stuff behind it is rose quartz, (currently called lavender quartz because of its deep colour) far too hard to grind for pigment!

Rune