Banded green copper ore. Beautiful, and best handled dry and unpolished by you.
The aesthetic
Malachite is a copper carbonate that grows in rounded botryoidal masses, and cutting through those layers is what produces its famous concentric bands of light and dark green. It forms in the oxidised upper zones of copper deposits, often alongside blue azurite, into which it slowly alters. It is soft, and because it is a copper mineral the dust is toxic, so it is worked wet and left sealed.
The dynamic
Malachite is associated with transformation and with protection during it, and has an old reputation as a stone that warns, said to break rather than let harm through.
Some variations
- banded malachite
- botryoidal malachite
- azurmalachite
- chrysocolla with malachite