It is actually quite difficult to get really top quality lepidolite in this richness from the mine today, but once it was very famous for beautiful lavender lepidolite, often shot through with embedded pink tourmalines. This 6 cm sphere is a very uniform and rich color, of highest grade carving rough from the mine. The associated piece of polished rough is simply a freebie to show how the rough looked when it started.

This is a classic oldstyle Himalaya Mine crystal with a color that is more red-purple than pink-red as is more typical for the mine. It was , they think, mined in the Ralph Potter era (before the mid-1960s) prior to the ownership of Pala Intl. After mining, it went into the Perkin Sams collection in Midland, Texas, which later was donated to the Houston Museum of Natural History (and then exchanged back to the current Himalaya Mine owner Pala Properties in later years). The piece is fat and massive, at 178 grams. It has INTENSE color and practically glows when even minimally backlit. Again, in contrast to more modern pieces which tend to pink, this is a deeply robust hue with a very saturated coloration. It is complete all around, and the matrix associations of white cleavelandite and purple lepidolite really highlight the color and accentuate the piece. ex Pala Intl company collection