If it feels warm or plastic then you don’t have a real geode in front of you. Like any other stone (barring amber), a geode should also feel a bit cool to the touch. Scratching quartz with a knife is borderline impossible due to the hardness difference and it’s a good way to easily check. Calcite will scratch with a knife, but it’s not faked very often. Amethyst may have color zoning, but the color won’t gather in the cracks. Take a look, they should be hexagonal in structure and often tightly packed together. I’ve never seen anyone attempt a fake geode, even in an art piece, that wasn’t simple quartz or amethyst crystals. Does it look like a bunch of little layers of compact, hard stone? This exterior chalcedony found in the majority of quartz geodes is hard enough to take it simply wouldn’t be worth the effort. They’re sometimes sold at high prices to the unwary as some kind of rare oddity.Ĭheck around the exterior edges of the hardened geode. Dye, as mentioned above, is the most common “fake” that’s done to geodes. Visual inspection is the best spot to start. If you think you have something fake on your hands, it’s time to get a bit of testing done. They’re not strictly a spherical or semi-spherical formation with a hardened outer layer, but instead a pocket of crystals filled inside of a hard rock. The ones labeled as a geode are often vugs found in basalt, with the outer edges trimmed down to create a vague geode shape. Now, not everything sold as a geode is actually a geode. It’s most likely someone who misheard people talking about synthetic gemstones and transferred the property to geodes. I’ve seen anecdotes of entirely synthetic geodes grown that can be identified by a lack of internal flaws, but this is unlikely. They can easily be identified: they’ll readily scratch with any kind of steel tool and feel wrong in the hand. They range from plastic piles of junk that kind of look like the real thing, all the way to entirely synthetic stones created through complicated chemical procedures.įake geodes, those that are entirely constructed, are a thing.īut they’re unlikely to be sold to you directly as a geode, they’re often made of resin and parts of larger sculptures. Trickery is rather common in the mineral collecting world, unfortunately, so learning how to source and identify fakes is one of the first things you should do. In the world of rock collecting, few things are more frustrating than running across fakes. But there’s fake everything out there, the question is whether or not it’s meant to fool collectors or just to be an interesting object in its own right.

Natural amethyst geode