What Your Crystals Never Told You: An Insider's Look at the Crystal Industry

Tonight’s talk is an insider’s look at the crystal-selling business.

Crystals: quartz for healing, obsidian for scrying, malachite to repel snakebite… the history of crystal and stone magic did not commence with the New Age, though certainly it’s had a huge revival in the new age movement. And there have always been merchants to provided the practitioner, too, from the time of the medieval market right up to today’s Mind-Body-Spirit Festival. Tonight’s talk is an insider’s look at the crystal-selling business. Dr Tony Street received his doctorate in Geology from Cambridge 30 years ago and has since then worked in rock business as a one-man mission for ethical trading, sourcing and dealing. Tonight he reveals all the ways that the unscrupulous sellers in this industry dupe customers, from dyeing cheap rocks to look like more valuable ones, to selling common duplicates for rarer stones, to strip-mining processes. He will be doing this talk with a table-full of samples showing the real and the fake, the genuine and the doctored, and will be teaching people how quickly to tell the differences. Anyone who buys rocks, crystals, stones or fossils – even if you just got a piece of amethyst for your pagan altar – will be both horrified and fascinated. We promise, you will never look at a lump of turquoise or obsidian the same way again.

Tony is a lively and entertaining speaker, and his talks always have a touch of the stand-up comedy feel to them, and not simply because he bears an uncanny resemblance to Billy Connolly. He is the proprietor of Tony Street Fossils, which operates from Covent Garden’s Jubilee Market, and is a trusted seller to much of London’s pagan community.

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