Material families
30 browsing groups that gather entries by mineral or material family.
What this page files
A family on this site is a browse grouping: entries that share a mineralogical or material lineage are filed together, so a reader who knows one member can find the rest. It is an editorial route into the entries, not a rank recognised by any naming authority.Where the line falls
Membership of a family says nothing about which naming tier a term occupies. Quartz gathers a species together with its colour varieties and with market coinages that were never mineral names at all; where each of them sits is recorded per entry, and a family page never promotes a coinage by listing it beside a species.
By the numbers
- Families
- 30
- Materials covered
- 433
Pages in this section
- Quartz and chalcedony materials
- Feldspar materials
- Beryl minerals and gem varieties
- Tourmaline-supergroup minerals and gem varieties
- Garnet-group minerals and gem varieties
- Other silicate minerals
- Carbonate minerals
- Phosphate minerals
- Sulfate minerals
- Halide minerals
- Oxide minerals
- Native-element minerals
- Sulfide minerals
- Rocks and polymineral aggregates
- Jade materials
- Natural Glass (family)
- Opal and natural amorphous silica materials
- Fossil and mineralized materials
- Amber and natural resin materials
- Pearl and molluscan shell materials
- Coral materials
- Other animal-derived materials
- Plant-derived materials
- Man-made glass products
- Synthetic gem products
- Artificial gem products with no natural counterpart
- Assembled gem products
- Imitation gem products
- Bead-form and unidentified trade terms
- Borate and tungstate minerals