People may ask how long it takes for crystals to form. Some crystals can grow so fast that you can watch the reaction before your eyes. Before you respond with incredulous disbelief, think about the way that sugar can crystallize on a kitchen utensil when it’s left in a particularly sweet drink for too long. The icky fuzz that grows on batteries can rapidly reproduce and encourage nearby pieces of metal to reassemble themselves in new and strange ways.
However, these aren’t the life-giving crystals you’ve probably come to expect. Many fast-growing crystals, such as rust or the above-mentioned fuzz, can actually be harmful!
Why The Natural Way Takes Time
Nature makes crystals in a healthy way, though it takes an incredible amount of time to do so. While industrial crystals can be produced extremely quickly, you wouldn’t want to incorporate any of them into your meditative practices.
Water dissolves some sort of mineral when dealing with natural formation. Over time this water trickles into some sort of natural solvent in a lower layer of rock. It then tends to grow in an irregular pattern. Nature’s lines are never as straight as those cut by industrial machinery.
Even the fastest-growing natural crystals, such as quartz or salt, will still take some months before they become anything close to an appreciable size. Once they do, however, they’re usually not immediately discovered anyway. Such time allows them to constantly grow as a result of this trickling water process.
Tumbled stones are treated with water to ensure that they don’t adhere to a large amount of dirt, but this is not the same thing as industrially producing a crystal. While some people would always prefer to have rough clusters and raw stones, tumbled stones are still natural.
Some of the hardest types of minerals take millions of years to form. Diamonds are made from organic material that’s been compressed under layers of rock for long periods of time. Some might look at diamonds as fossilized matter in a certain way, which is important for those who focus heavily on longevity in their practice. A few other crystals have taken just as long to form, though most can be measured usually in terms of thousands or millions of calendar years.
Longest Crystal Formation Times
Rather than years, the length it takes for certain crystals to form is specified in terms of geological ages. Certain crystals began forming well before dinosaurs walked the earth. The longest ones have taken billions of years to form, which could perhaps stagger the imagination considering that these long predate the establishment of modern humanity.
People have been using these as long as they’ve been able to get them out of rocks, though some harder crystals have actually only been viable relatively recently due to the fact that it was too difficult to extract them from the geological strata that they previously lay dormant in.
Study More Crystal Growth At Crystals & Stones
When it comes to the kind of fine healing stones that we bring to market at Crystals & Stones, nature has taken many thousands of years to make them. We know which physical properties can affect different large or small crystals.
Anybody interested in learning more about crystals should feel free to contact us online. Crystals & Stones can instruct you in how natural chemical composition can improve your meditation.