Cow Shelter/Donation
The Divine Hindu App is here.
Chat free with top astrologers for your first 5 minutes every week, generate your Kundli, book temple Puja & Chadhava, and check today's Panchang — all in one app.
TL;DR — Sphatik is natural rock crystal — clear quartz, silicon dioxide, a trigonal mineral of hardness 7. Its imitations are ordinary glass, melted or reconstituted quartz (real silica, recast as an amorphous glass), lead glass and acrylic. Two things matter more than anything else. First, the weight test does not work here: quartz and soda-lime glass are too close in density to tell apart by hand, so the heft rule that identifies pyrite is useless for sphatik. Second, quartz is doubly refractive and glass is not, which means two crossed polarising lenses — or a phone screen and one polarised lens — separate them in seconds. And a counter-intuitive rule worth remembering: in sphatik, faint internal veils and wisps are evidence for authenticity. A large, cheap, perfectly flawless "crystal" is almost always glass.
Sphatik is the hardest material in this series to check by eye, for a reason that is easy to state and hard to get around: the thing it is faked with is chemically its close cousin. Glass is largely silica. Melted quartz is silica. The difference between rock crystal and glass is not what they are made of but how the atoms are arranged — orderly and crystalline in one, random and amorphous in the other — and that difference is invisible until you look at it the right way. This guide sets out how to look at it the right way, using tools most people already own. For what sphatik is traditionally used for and how a mala is customarily handled, see our sphatik mala guide.
What genuine sphatik actually is
Sphatik (स्फटिक) is the Sanskrit and Hindi name for rock crystal: the colourless, transparent variety of quartz. Quartz is silicon dioxide, SiO₂, one of the most abundant minerals in the earth's crust, and it grows in the trigonal crystal system — typically as six-sided prisms terminated by pyramid-like faces.
| Property | Natural quartz (sphatik) | Ordinary soda-lime glass |
|---|---|---|
| Structure | Crystalline — an ordered atomic lattice | Amorphous — a frozen liquid with no long-range order |
| Hardness | 7 on the Mohs scale | About 5 to 6 |
| Specific gravity | 2.65 | Roughly 2.4 to 2.6 |
| Optical behaviour | Doubly refractive (birefringent), uniaxial | Singly refractive (isotropic) |
| Refractive index | About 1.544 to 1.553 | Usually about 1.5, and higher for lead glass |
| Typical internal features | Healed fractures (veils, feathers), two-phase fluid inclusions, needles, phantoms, negative crystals | Spherical gas bubbles, swirl and flow lines, occasional stones and cords |
| Fracture | Conchoidal, no cleavage | Conchoidal, slightly greasier in appearance |
Read that table carefully, because it contains the two most important facts on this page. The densities are almost the same — which is why picking up a bead and judging its weight, the test that instantly identifies pyrite, tells you essentially nothing about sphatik. And the optical behaviour is completely different, which is the opening this guide is built on.
Sphatik is traditionally used for japa malas, for Shivalingams and for pendants, and it is customarily associated in tradition with coolness and with Shiva and Lakshmi worship. Those are matters of belief and custom. This page is about the mineral.
What the fakes are actually made of
| Substitute | What it is made of | How it gives itself away |
|---|---|---|
| Melted or reconstituted quartz | Genuine quartz — often low-grade offcuts and scrap — melted and recast into beads, spheres and points. Chemically silica; structurally an amorphous glass. Sold in the trade under names like "melted quartz" and "smelted quartz". | By far the commonest fake in the Indian market and the most deceptive, because a seller can honestly say the material is quartz. It is optically isotropic, so it fails the polariser test. Look for swirl and flow lines, and for perfectly round trapped bubbles. Cheap large spheres and points are overwhelmingly this. |
| Ordinary soda-lime glass | Pressed or moulded glass beads | Round or elongated gas bubbles, swirl striae, a faint mould seam around the widest circumference, slightly rounded and soft facet junctions, and a fire-polished surface with a faint orange-peel texture. Warms in the hand faster than quartz. |
| Lead glass | Glass with lead oxide added, giving higher refractive index and more sparkle | Used where brilliance sells, as in faceted "crystal" beads. Noticeably heavier than both quartz and ordinary glass, softer, and singly refractive. Cut and polished lead glass looks better than natural quartz, which is the point and the warning. |
| Acrylic and polymer | Moulded plastic beads | The easiest fake to catch. Very light, warms to skin temperature almost instantly, scratches with a fingernail or a coin, and shows a mould seam. Common in low-priced 108-bead "crystal" malas. |
| Coated and treated glass | Glass with a vacuum-deposited metallic film, sold as "aura", "angel aura" or "rainbow" crystal | A coating is a coating. The iridescent film wears and chips at the drill hole and at bead contact points. Coated natural quartz also exists and is a legitimate treated product when disclosed. |
| Cracked-and-dyed quartz | Real quartz heated and quenched to induce internal fractures, sometimes with dye drawn into them, sold as "fire" or "rainbow" crystal | Real quartz, treated. The fractures are unnaturally uniform and radiate from the centre; dyed material shows colour concentrated along the cracks. An acetone swab lifts colour from dyed pieces. |
| Synthetic hydrothermal quartz | Genuine quartz grown in an autoclave from a seed plate | The honest hard case: it is quartz, it is crystalline, and it passes every test in this guide. It is usually identified by a flat seed plate visible under magnification, or by characteristic breadcrumb-like inclusions. Only a laboratory settles it. It is uncommon in devotional malas because natural quartz is cheap enough not to be worth replicating. |
Tests that actually work
1. The crossed-polariser test — the best test you can do at home
This is the one that settles quartz against glass, and it needs almost nothing.
The principle. Quartz is doubly refractive: light entering it splits into two rays travelling at slightly different speeds. Glass is singly refractive: light passes through it in one ray, whatever direction it comes from. Placed between two polarising filters set at right angles to each other — a set-up that normally blocks all light — a doubly refractive material rotates the light and lets some through, while a singly refractive one does not.
How to do it. You need two polarising filters. Two lenses from a pair of polarised sunglasses work. So does one polarised lens plus a laptop or phone screen, since most LCD screens emit polarised light. Set the screen to display plain white, hold the polarised lens above it, and rotate the lens until the screen goes dark through it. Now place the bead between the screen and the lens and rotate the bead slowly through a full turn.
- Natural quartz brightens and darkens four times in a complete rotation — four light positions and four dark ones. That clean, repeating four-fold extinction is what a crystal does.
- Glass, melted quartz and acrylic stay dark throughout, because they have no crystal structure to rotate the light.
- Sometimes glass shows a pattern anyway. Strained glass can display anomalous birefringence — but it looks quite different: a wavy, cross-hatched or snake-like pattern that shifts irregularly, not four clean extinctions. Once you have seen both, you will not confuse them.
One caveat worth knowing: viewed exactly down its optic axis, a quartz bead can appear to stay dark. If a bead seems to fail, turn it to a different orientation and try again before concluding anything.
2. Loupe the inclusions, and expect to find some
This is where sphatik inverts the usual instinct. In a natural crystal you are hoping to see something.
- Natural quartz typically shows faint internal veils and feathers — healed fractures that look like wisps of smoke or the edge of a fingerprint — along with occasional needles, tiny crystals, growth phantoms, and two-phase inclusions: a liquid-filled cavity with a small gas bubble inside it that may visibly move.
- Glass and melted quartz show free spherical gas bubbles sitting in solid material, and swirl or flow lines where the melt moved. Bubbles in glass are often perfectly round or drawn into teardrops.
The distinction to learn: a bubble inside a liquid inclusion is natural. A free bubble in solid material is not. And a large, entirely flawless, inexpensive clear bead is far more likely to be glass than to be exceptional quartz.
3. Hardness, on a hidden surface
Quartz at 7 is harder than ordinary glass at about 5 to 6. So a quartz bead will scratch a piece of window glass, and window glass will not scratch quartz. Do it in this order: take a scrap piece of glass and drag the sharp edge around the bead's drill hole across it, pressing firmly. Quartz leaves a visible scratch, not just a white powdery smear that wipes away. Then reverse the test — draw the glass across the bead — and check the bead is unmarked. Only the pair of results together means anything, and it must be done on the drill-hole edge or the back of a cabochon, never on a display surface.
4. Thermal feel, done properly
Quartz conducts heat better than glass and considerably better than plastic, so it feels colder against the skin and stays cold longer. To make this useful rather than vague, compare rather than judge in isolation: hold the suspect bead against your cheek or upper lip and then hold a piece of known glass there. Quartz should stay cool noticeably longer. Against acrylic the difference is dramatic. Against soda-lime glass it is real but subtle, so treat it as supporting evidence and not as a verdict.
5. Examine the drill hole and the surface finish
Under a 10x loupe, a cut and polished quartz bead shows crisp junctions where facets or surfaces meet, and a drill hole with slightly chipped, glassy edges from the drill breaking through. A moulded glass bead shows a softened, rounded profile everywhere, an occasional seam, and a hole that was formed rather than cut. Coated beads show wear-through at the hole and at the flats where beads rub.
6. Compare beads across the mala
Natural material varies. On a genuine sphatik mala some beads will be water-clear, some will carry a faint veil, one or two may have a wisp near an edge. That variation is normal and is what natural stone looks like. A 108-bead mala where every single bead is identically flawless is a manufacturing signature, not a quality signal.
7. The acetone swab for treated and dyed material
A cotton bud dampened with acetone or nail-polish remover, wiped on an inconspicuous spot, lifts colour from dyed cracked quartz and from coated beads with a poorly bonded film. Genuine untreated rock crystal is unaffected.
Tests that do not work, and why
The weight test — and this one is important
Everywhere else in this series, heft is a good test. Here it is not, and the reason is simple arithmetic: quartz has a specific gravity of 2.65 and ordinary soda-lime glass runs roughly 2.4 to 2.6. That gap is far too small to detect by hand, especially in a small bead. Anyone who tells you they can tell sphatik from glass by weight is telling you about their confidence, not about the material. Weight does help against acrylic, which is markedly lighter, and against lead glass, which is markedly heavier — but for the fake you are most likely to meet, it is useless.
The float test
Meaningless here. Quartz sinks. Glass sinks. Melted quartz sinks. Lead glass sinks. Even most acrylic sinks. There is nothing in this comparison that floats, so the test cannot discriminate between anything.
The hair and rubber-band test
A persistent piece of folklore: wrap a hair or a rubber band around the crystal, focus sunlight through it with a magnifying glass, and a "real" crystal supposedly will not burn the hair. There is no physical basis for this. Both quartz and glass are transparent to visible light and both will focus it. The claim seems to have travelled from an old test for distinguishing diamond, where it does not work either.
"Real crystal shows rainbows"
Backwards, or at least badly stated. Internal rainbows come from thin-film interference at internal fractures. They appear in natural quartz that happens to be fractured, they appear in glass that happens to be fractured, and they are deliberately induced in cracked-and-quenched quartz sold as "rainbow crystal". Meanwhile plenty of excellent natural sphatik has no rainbows at all because it has no fractures. Rainbows tell you about fractures, not about material.
"Perfectly clear means it is high quality"
The single most expensive misunderstanding in this category, because it points buyers directly at glass. Genuinely flawless, large, natural rock crystal exists and is prized — and priced accordingly. When you see it cheap and in quantity, in big beads or a big sphere, the flawlessness is telling you it was poured, not grown.
The scratch-with-a-knife test
A steel blade sits around 5.5 on the Mohs scale, which is below quartz at 7 and roughly level with glass. So a knife fails to scratch quartz, and often fails to scratch harder glass too, which makes the result ambiguous in exactly the comparison that matters. It also risks marking the piece. The glass-scratch pair described above is the better version of the same idea.
Judging by feel or by sensation
Some people hold a bead and describe what they feel. That is a personal and devotional practice with its own place, and we are not dismissing it — but it cannot be a test of what a material is made of. Material identity is a physical question with physical answers. Keep the two separate, and do not let a seller substitute one for the other.
| Check | Catches | Misses |
|---|---|---|
| Crossed polarisers | Glass, melted quartz, acrylic — the whole main group | Synthetic hydrothermal quartz; beads viewed down the optic axis |
| Loupe on inclusions | Glass and melted quartz, by bubbles and swirl | Very clean glass; treated natural quartz |
| Glass-scratch pair | Soda-lime glass, lead glass, acrylic | Harder specialty glasses |
| Thermal comparison | Acrylic clearly; glass weakly | Melted quartz |
| Drill hole and surface finish | Moulded and coated beads | Cut glass finished like stone |
| Bead-to-bead variation | Mass-produced uniform beads | Well-sorted natural beads |
| Weight in hand | Acrylic and lead glass only | Soda-lime glass — the commonest case |
| Float, hair-burn, rainbow count | Nothing | Everything |
What a lab report does and does not prove
What it establishes. A gemmological laboratory separates quartz from glass in minutes, using refractive index, specific gravity and a polariscope, and it can identify melted quartz, coatings, dyes and induced fracturing. A good report states the material, whether it is natural, and every treatment detected, tied to a report number and measurements.
What it does not establish, and the practical problem.
- Nobody tests inexpensive beads. A laboratory report costs more than most sphatik malas, so it is not commissioned. This is the honest position, and it is why the polariser test above matters so much: for sphatik, a five-rupee pair of polarised lenses does what a laboratory would do for the specific question you care about.
- A certificate identifies one item. On a strung mala, a report on a sample bead does not speak for the other 107 unless the seller says how the lot was verified.
- An unnamed laboratory is not a laboratory. Look for the name, a report number and a stated method. Without those, it is a marketing document.
- No certificate addresses devotional matters. A laboratory identifies material. What sphatik is traditionally used for is a question of custom and belief, and no document speaks to it.
- Our own position, stated plainly. Divine Hindu holds government laboratory certification for Karungali ebony wood only. We do not claim it for sphatik, crystals, gemstones or rudraksha. Our approach across categories is on the lab certification page.
Price as a signal: what "too cheap" means for sphatik
Quartz is abundant, so clear quartz in small sizes is genuinely inexpensive and a low price on a small-bead mala is not suspicious. What is expensive is size combined with clarity. Large pieces of water-clear, crack-free natural rock crystal are scarce, and that scarcity rises steeply with dimension. So the price signal in sphatik is not a single number — it is the relationship between size, clarity and cost.
| What you see | What it usually means |
|---|---|
| A large, water-clear, flawless sphere at a modest price | Almost certainly melted quartz or glass. Natural rock crystal of that size and clarity is a serious purchase. |
| A 108-bead mala of large beads, every one identically flawless | Moulded. Natural material varies bead to bead. |
| Beads with faint veils and wisps in some but not all | A good sign. This is what natural quartz looks like. |
| Extremely bright, sparkly faceted "crystal" beads | Often lead glass, which has a higher refractive index than quartz and genuinely does sparkle more. |
| Vivid rainbow flashes throughout a clear stone | Usually cracked-and-quenched quartz or coated material. Both are treatments, not grades. |
| "Melted quartz", "smelted quartz" or "reconstituted" anywhere in the description | An honest seller telling you it is not rock crystal. Read the small print. |
What to ask a seller
- Is this natural rock crystal, or melted or reconstituted quartz? The single most important question in this category. Ask it in exactly those words.
- Is it quartz or glass? Simple, and it forces a plain answer.
- Has it been heated, fractured, coated or dyed? Rainbow and aura material is treated by definition.
- Will the beads show any internal veils or wisps? A seller who says "no, all perfectly clear" on large cheap beads has answered a different question than they think.
- What is the bead diameter and the mala length? Then measure them.
- If there is a certificate, which laboratory and what report number? An honest "it is our own document" beats a vague one.
- What is the return policy if the beads stay dark through crossed polarisers? This is the question that separates the market.
Where fakes enter the market
- Bulk bead and decor imports. Melted quartz is manufactured at scale specifically to fill demand for clear crystal at low prices, and it enters the devotional market through wholesalers who label by appearance.
- Large decor items — spheres, points, pyramids, Shivalingams. The bigger the piece, the stronger the incentive to cast rather than cut, and the harder it is for a buyer to judge.
- Open marketplaces, where "crystal" is used for quartz, for glass and for lead glass interchangeably, and the photographs are generic.
- Exhibition and fair stalls, with no return address and dramatic lighting that flatters glass.
- Combo and gift sets, where a mixed bracelet contains one or two genuine stones and the clear beads are glass.
- Social video selling, where the on-camera demonstration is usually the hair-burn test or a rainbow flash — neither of which answers the question.
A five-minute check when the parcel arrives
- Set up crossed polarisers — a white phone or laptop screen and one polarised sunglass lens — and rotate a bead through a full turn. Look for four clean light-and-dark cycles.
- Try two or three beads in different orientations, in case the first was viewed down its optic axis.
- Loupe several beads. Hope for faint veils and wisps; be wary of free round bubbles and swirl lines.
- Compare beads across the mala. Some variation is right.
- Scratch a scrap of glass with the drill-hole edge, then check the bead is unmarked.
- Hold a bead against your cheek next to a known piece of glass. Quartz stays cool longer.
- Loupe the drill hole for a moulded profile, a seam or a worn coating.
- Acetone swab an inconspicuous spot if the piece has any colour or iridescence.
- Measure the bead diameter against the listing.
- If the polariser test fails on several beads in several orientations, return it inside the window.
Once you are satisfied, our guide on cleaning and energising a mala covers what comes next, and thread, knotted and silver-capped stringing covers assembly.
The same problem in other materials
Quartz has coloured relatives with their own substitution problems, and the tests differ for each: natural citrine versus heat-treated amethyst, rose quartz, natural versus dyed, green aventurine and aventurescence and tiger's eye and chatoyancy. For minerals outside the quartz family, original versus fake pyrite and real versus fake Navratna gemstones. For mixed-stone pieces, money magnet bracelets, stone by stone and our crystal bracelet guide. Outside minerals altogether: original versus fake rudraksha, original versus fake Karungali, original versus fake Tulsi mala and original versus fake Chandan. If you are choosing between mala materials, the four-way comparison is the place to start.
Frequently Asked Questions
How can I tell sphatik from glass at home?
Use crossed polarisers, which is the one home test that genuinely settles it. Quartz is doubly refractive and glass is not, so a quartz bead placed between two polarising filters set at right angles brightens and darkens four times through a full rotation, while glass, melted quartz and acrylic stay dark throughout. You can build the set-up from a white phone or laptop screen, which emits polarised light, and one lens from a pair of polarised sunglasses. Try two or three beads in different orientations, because a bead viewed exactly down its optic axis can appear to stay dark.
Does the weight test work for sphatik?
No, and this is the most important thing to unlearn. Quartz has a specific gravity of 2.65 and ordinary soda-lime glass runs roughly 2.4 to 2.6 — a gap far too small to detect by hand, especially in a small bead. The heft test that identifies pyrite instantly is useless for the fake you are most likely to meet here. Weight does help in two narrow cases: acrylic is markedly lighter, and lead glass is markedly heavier. For quartz against ordinary glass it tells you nothing.
What is melted or reconstituted quartz?
It is genuine quartz, often low-grade offcuts and scrap, melted and recast into beads, spheres and points. Chemically it is still silica, which is why a seller can honestly say the material is quartz — but structurally it is an amorphous glass with no crystal lattice, so it is not rock crystal and it is worth a fraction of the price. It is the commonest and most deceptive fake in the Indian market. It fails the crossed-polariser test, and under a loupe it shows swirl and flow lines and perfectly round trapped bubbles.
Should a real sphatik bead be perfectly clear?
Not necessarily, and the assumption that it should is what points buyers straight at glass. Faint internal veils, wisps and feathers — healed fractures that look like smoke or the edge of a fingerprint — are normal in natural quartz and are evidence for authenticity rather than against it. Genuinely flawless large rock crystal exists and is prized, but it is expensive. A large, water-clear, entirely flawless piece at a modest price is almost always melted quartz or glass.
Do air bubbles mean a crystal is fake?
Free, perfectly spherical bubbles sitting in solid material indicate glass or melted quartz, so they are a strong warning. But natural quartz commonly contains two-phase inclusions — a liquid-filled cavity that itself contains a small gas bubble, which may visibly move when the bead is tilted. Those are evidence of natural origin. The distinction to learn is whether the bubble sits inside something or floats free in the solid.
Does the hair or rubber-band burning test work on crystal?
No. The claim is that focusing sunlight through a genuine crystal with a magnifying glass will not burn a hair or rubber band wrapped around it. There is no physical basis for this. Both quartz and glass are transparent to visible light and both will focus it, so the outcome depends on how you hold the lens rather than on the material. The claim appears to have travelled from an old and equally unreliable test for diamond.
Do rainbows inside a crystal mean it is real?
No. Internal rainbows come from thin-film interference at internal fractures, and fractures occur in natural quartz, in glass, and most of all in quartz that has been deliberately heated and quenched to induce cracking, which is then sold as rainbow or fire crystal. Meanwhile plenty of excellent natural sphatik shows no rainbows at all, simply because it has no fractures. Rainbows tell you about the fractures in a piece, not about what the piece is made of.
Is a sphatik certificate worth anything?
A genuine laboratory report is decisive, because separating quartz from glass takes a gemmologist minutes using refractive index, specific gravity and a polariscope. The practical problem is cost: a report is more expensive than most sphatik malas, so it is rarely commissioned, and most sphatik certificates in the market are seller-issued documents. Look for a named laboratory, a report number and a stated method. For this material a five-rupee pair of polarised lenses does the same job for the question you actually care about.
Does Divine Hindu sphatik have government lab certification?
No. Divine Hindu holds government laboratory certification for Karungali ebony wood only, and we do not extend that claim to sphatik, crystals, gemstones or rudraksha. For sphatik the useful verification is physical rather than documentary, which is why this guide sets out the polariser, loupe and hardness checks in detail and encourages you to run them on anything we sell as readily as on anything else.
How should a sphatik mala be cared for?
Quartz is hard at 7 on the Mohs scale but it is brittle, so the practical risks are chipping and cracking rather than scratching. Keep the mala away from hard surfaces and store it in a soft pouch rather than loose with other beads. Wipe it with a soft damp cloth; avoid ultrasonic cleaners, which can propagate existing internal fractures, and avoid sudden temperature changes for the same reason. Check the cord every few months and restring before it frays, because a dropped quartz bead on a tiled floor usually chips.
Visit us or order online
If you want a mala you can put through every check on this page, the Round Sphatik Mala, 108 beads we stock is the traditional japa form of clear quartz used for daily chanting. Hold a bead between crossed polarisers, loupe a few for veils, compare beads against each other — and hold us to exactly the standard this article sets for anyone else. For 54-bead malas, bracelets and larger pieces, or to examine material in person, visit Divine Hindu Store, Jayanagar 3rd Block East, Bengaluru 560011. Related reading: sphatik mala guide · four-way mala comparison · cleaning and energising a mala · real versus fake gemstones.
