Citrine, Mostly Born from Amethyst

Citrine is the yellow-to-orange variety of quartz, coloured by traces of iron. Natural citrine is genuinely uncommon; most stones sold as citrine are heat-treated amethyst or smoky quartz, which turn yellow or reddish-orange when heated, and the deep reddish tone marketed as Madeira citrine is almost always heated material. This is worth knowing because much of the folklore printed for citrine is really borrowed, the natural stone having been too rare historically to accumulate a tradition of its own. In modern crystal practice citrine is the merchant's stone or success stone, associated with wealth, the solar plexus centre and the sun; these associations date from the twentieth century and rest on the yellow colour. Citrine is one of the accepted November birthstones alongside topaz. It should not be confused with the yellow of true topaz, a different and harder mineral.

Because natural citrine is rare, the stone has long travelled under other names in the trade: heat-treated quartz of this colour has been sold historically as Spanish topaz and Madeira topaz, borrowing the more prestigious mineral's reputation, and Kunz records the same confusion running the other way, with genuine yellow quartz sometimes passed off as topaz to buyers unable to tell the two apart. In Scotland a related smoky-to-yellow quartz found in the Cairngorm mountains, called cairngorm, was cut for centuries into the pommels of dirks and sgian-dubhs and the brooches of Highland dress, a distinct regional lapidary tradition built on the same mineral species as citrine.