Spiritual Temperature Check #3: Crystals
Secrets from the oldest and most prestigious crystal fair in the world.
Spiritual Temperature Check is an essay series that attempts the impossible: to make sense of mainstream spiritual culture, the good, the bad and the holy. I’ve previously written about Los Angeles and astrology, by way of the planet Saturn.
i. White women with the most intense blowouts you’ve ever seen—towering Karen cuts, maximalist 90s prom curls, symmetrical waves parting from the face like Moses’ Red Sea—stalked the city of Tucson, Arizona. They were ready to spend serious bucks on the biggest and best crystals shipped and flown into the state. For these women, it started with tumblestone crystals in their handbags, then in their bras. Soon they were using crystal wands and “grids” to manifest rich partners and scalable businesses. Now they have five-bedroom houses and run spas and salons that need grounding, centring, cleansing and upgrading with ten-foot tall crystals. I didn’t realise women like this existed as an all-American subculture but seeing them barter for amethyst water features and clear quartz full-length mirrors I realised that, culturally speaking, they had very much arrived.
ii. True crystal heads know about the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show. The sellers lust after the opportunity to take their product there, and buyers and collectors plan their cross-country holiday around February when the show happens every year. You can buy any crystal imaginable, as long as you have a week to walk around all the different locations across the city and talk to the right people in dodgy hotel rooms where secret deals are made for dizzying amounts of money.
iii. They say that when the student is ready the teacher will appear. I said, OK, world’s oldest and most prestigious crystal show, bring me the crystal I need. At some point, I wandered over to some pillars of rose quartz about the length of my forearm. I don’t like rose quartz, never have. (When I was in my crystal phase as a kid I knew a boring stone when I saw it: pale pink, generic, vitreous rather than dazzling. It felt like I had to like rose quartz as a single-digit Disney-watching female.) But I was drawn to this area as if by an invisible force and then I knew which pillar of rose quartz to pick up. This crystal glowed. Not literally glowed, but glowed to me. Great, I said to this dude from Brazil. I have to buy this rock but I don’t want to. He seemed to know exactly what I meant.
iv. 2024 is not the best year for the crystal business: very strong, yes, but not the most profitable. In 2020, 2021 and 2022 crystals felt like viral objects, hot property, thanks to teenagers on TikTok and the pandemic scaring people into becoming introverted spiritualists. This year the global economy has tanked but the industry isn’t concerned. According to Tucson’s traders, those three crucial years changed everything forever.
For Karen
v. There were numerous free show magazines that publicised the rarer stones available and interviewed the various key traders, but this one was hers. She called herself “The Queen of Rocks”. After reading Rock Your World front to back, I knew I had to meet her. She was a lion in human clothing: proud, dramatic, regal and, in fairness, completely batshit obsessed with rocks. She told me to put citrine on my writing desk at home if I wanted to earn more money for my work. It’s probably not worth mentioning but there don’t seem to be any normal people who sell crystals for a living.
vi. Some people and cultures believe that crystals can be used for: manifestation purposes, clairvoyance, to enhance creativity, to sleep better, to boost low energy, to cleanse your space of negative energy, to be shaped into eggs to put up your vagina (circa. mid-2010s, source: Gwyneth Paltrow). The Greeks, Egyptians, Romans and pretty much every ancient and pre-modern civilization used them for health, well-being and spiritual purposes. I read that the indigenous Arizonans used quartz crystals to help them diagnose certain ailments and that Arizona turquoise was used as a symbol of protection and represented the connection between earth and sky, the physical and spiritual worlds.
vii. I had to use my full reserves of self-restraint not to buy a $2500 free-standing amethyst and get it shipped back to London to put in my flat. My Amex felt like the One Ring glowing in my pocket. It’s not even that much money, I told myself. Nerds got into NFTs and paid more than that for a pink monkey wearing a sailor hat. Men sink endless coins over a lifetime into pay-to-play phone games or OnlyFans subscriptions. Aren’t crystals worth more than those combined—the original art, the most beautiful product of the earth? Gold and silver are always in demand and consistently well-valued. These jewels of nature endure without decaying or losing their lustre. Seeing a huge crystal each day would make the very roots of me grow into the earth. I would shine with wisdom and self-assuredness. I would become rich in every real sense. Obviously, I didn’t buy it: that would have been insane.
viii. The greatest crystals I saw at the show, ranked;
5. Tiny rose quartz penises; full cock and balls. The ideal gift for the modern middle-class hen-do.
4. Very ugly decorative parrots atop football-sized chunks of fool’s gold. Mass-produced.
3. A pair of human-sized selenite angel wings lit from behind. Possessed this feathery quality. Made me want to cry.
2. A giant slab of rutilated quartz from Brazil: a yellow crystal that contained within it millions of golden confetti streams. It looked like a Gatsby party was happening inside.
1. These Dungeons and Dragons dice-shapes of fluorite in every colour you can imagine: pale blue, midnight blue, caustic yellow, silver, mint green. Perfect. So perfect, they made me feel maternal.
ix. When I was primary school age, there was a family across the road from me. For ease, let’s call them hippies. One of the daughters was in my class, so on occasion, I went over to their house after school, which was quite fascinating for a young anthropologist like me. It smelled of patchouli and soil. There was a topless photograph of the mum framed in the bathroom. The living room featured a little pile of crystals and they had a thing for fairies: fairy windchimes, fairy wall hangings, fairy lamps, probably spelt fairy ‘faerie’. I could tell that they talked about ideas and feelings, rather than what was on TV or whether it was fish fingers or Chicken Tonight for dinner. These people still exist in the UK in the sense that the sixties and seventies happened and established alt groups die hard (see: the continued existence of emos, horse girls and foodies). But recently I’ve thought about how a few of the girls at school who used to call that daughter “pee girl” and spread the rumour that she had nits, now have crystals artfully placed around their homes, concern themselves with the toxicity levels of shop-bought tampons, go barefoot in the park and tell their social media followers about the astrological make-up of their firstborn children.
x. I met a man who agreed to be interviewed if his identity was concealed. He’s in his 30s and attractive, hails from the Midwest but reminded me of a teen cast member of The OC all grown up. He called himself a new-era digital nomad (I thought you have to work to be a digital nomad but honestly his scam sounds great). For the past five or six years, he’s bought crystals wholesale at this show for next to nothing, mostly from Brazil where crystal mining practices can be shady for reasons I won’t go into here because you can Google if you want to know. He then returns with his MBA skills to sell the crystals back to people for between $80,000 and $120,000 of profit (while his temporary staff run around buying up the cheapest stock for next time). When it’s over he goes to east Asia to live like a prince for the remaining eleven months of the year.
xi. I once visited a crystal shop that was featured on Goop. I walked inside and felt a blast of cool energy hit me and then whip through my body from bottom to top. It definitely wasn’t air con but it felt comparable to it.
xii. A parable about crystals, as softly told by Frederico, the head of a Brazilian ethical crystal business, whose family has been selling at this show for three generations: Imagine a poor family of farmers who own some land in Brazil. A huge rainstorm washes away their fences, so all their animals run away. The damage and loss of funds is unimaginable to them. They curse the rain but decide to stay positive and pray, and set to work fixing up all the fences. After a few weeks of this, they reach a rockier section of their land and see that the wash of the storm has opened up a cave of crystal: pure blue fluorite. It changes their lives—they receive hundreds of thousands of dollars for the valuable minerals that they sell to Frederico, who has the knowledge and clientele to be able to sell them at a show like this. This was no miracle. There are plenty of stories like it, of working Brazilian people playing and living and planting on very wealthy land.
xiii. A crystal went viral for being evil during the pandemic. Maybe evil is too harsh a word. It was rumoured to fuck you up and depending on your attachment to circumstances and relationships, it could be a positive or negative ride. I watched some of the TikTok videos of young people who bought it and within days, weeks and months, reported of their lives being upended. Moldavite is a rare crystal made of glass and formed by a meteorite impact—that is to say, there isn’t a lot of it going around. I found a moldavite seller at the show and bought an ugly pendant with a tiny blob of it inside. I put it on straight away, not knowing what to expect, and within minutes felt nauseous. The sickness didn’t pass. I walked around the glass cases of smoky quartz pyramids and geodes of hypnotising opal with my hand to my throat. It felt like I’d developed a cold. I took it off after a few hours for a break. By day three of wearing it, I had a vague mild headache but the initial sensations had passed. A teenager who noticed what I was wearing suggested that this was due to a release of negative energy.
xiv. If you’re skeptical about these healing crystals, they likely won’t do you any good. They’re unlikely to do you any harm, though. While there’s no scientific evidence for crystals, that hasn’t stopped people from trying them.—healthline.com
xv. The culture was always going to be this way, at the end. Your mum has a crystal-infused water bottle she bought off a dropshipping app for a few quid; your girlfriend insists on staying at the hotel chain that offers crystal healings on the spa menu; you will die knowing what a yoni egg is. We love owning things too much and we are naturals at conquering the land, laying claim to what we see. We are either the children of colonialists or earth-worshippers. We believe that the natural world can fit in our pockets, to be pulled out to cure our human problems and ignored when life goes well.
xvi. My Uber driver asked me about why I had been in town. You look too intelligent to believe in all that craziness about the crystals, he said. Then he told me a story about how his late wife got really into them when she had cancer. They didn’t help her but they made her happy—the collection was something beautiful she could look at every day. Depending on her mood or pain level, she’d pick out a certain colour of stone that supposedly had a property to remedy it. Quite quickly, she stopped reading articles about them and just decided what she knew about them through instinct or female intuition. The driver reached into the glove compartment and pulled out a little drawstring bag of crystals. It’s stupid really, he said, but he likes to take some of them around in the car with him.
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Against all odds I have done some fun work recently. Here’s a Rolling Stone UK print cover story on the brat of the summer, Charli XCX, a digital cover story on Bring Me The Horizon and a long read on Noah Kahan for GQ. Besides writing these and waiting for the summer to start, I’ve gotten deep into some other esoteric shit that’s too weird to explain here. I’ve also figured out a rebrand for this newsletter, which I’ll share with you soon. My friend Sophie, who kindly designed a logo for me back in January, is probably shaking her head reading this because it’s been on the back burner for so long. Anyway, please look forward to that. Share this essay with any and all certified freaks you know who might be into this.