I have been collecting cool rocks for as long as I have been alive, which kind of spiralled when I got into Steven Universe as a kid, and then briefly into contemporary witchcraft. Both of those have passed since, and now I am left with a collection of crystals which still gets new additons every now and then. Other than that, I also used to collect dried roses, seashells, seaglass, and fossils!
These are my quartzes! All of the pink ones that you can see are Rose Quartz. I bought the large unpolished one as a kid on a schooltrip in the Mátra Museum in Gyöngyös, because I was told it's a healing stone. The purple ones are Amethyst, the egg is Jasper, we've had that since I can remember.
In order: Turquoise, Peridot, Fluorite, Rodochrosite, and Cat's eye. Peridot is my birthstone, I bought it at the August 20th fair in Hortobágy years ago. The Fluorite is from a local thrift store, it measures exactly one meter! I felt so lucky to have found it. Rodochrosite is special to me because back in my Steven Universe fan days I had an original character based on that stone, and my mother bough this for me without knowing anything about that!
These are my tinies+manmades! The ones on top are sunstone, which is a manmade stone. I bought one of these necklaces in Greece, along with my mother's yellow jade. (from those tourist trap shops, you know the ones) You can also see Opalite, (the broken ring and the other piece) which is usually sold as moonstone. Also manmade, but pretty! The butterfly pin is mother of pearl, it belongs to my mother technically but it's been in my collection for ages. The irridescent one is Labradorite, which took me ages to track down: I found it at a folk tradition festival which my father took me to. You can also spot a little Tiger's eye and a tiny pearl in a cage, but the identity of the rest of them is a mystery to me. I actually used to be worried that the green-brown rough one is toxic.
All of these are Agates: The geode is from a tourist trap in Szilvásvárad (tourist traps are the best place to get stones lmao) The slices are seocnd hand from facebook marketplace. All of these are very obviously dyed, but I like them!
These have got to be some of the coolest things I own! Upper left corner is ammonite fossil fragments that I collected myself, while the upper right corner is other fossils, such as corall and what looks like a scallop, if it even really is a fossil...
The bottom left corner is seaglass, the right is a series of cool shiny rocks (crystal clusters mainly) that I picked up on beaches!
The rocks in jars are just random pebbles I picked up as a kid, that's less cool. However, the three large ones were brought home for me by my mother when she was in the Alps! One of them glitters, I am guessing that it has mica but I can't be sure! The tiny one in the middle is volcanic pumice.
The Starfish is also from a tourist trap in Szilvásvárad, (my father got it when i was a small child) and so is that paperweight... thing? All of those shells are real btw. The roses I dried myself a couple years ago: the rainbow one is from the graduation boquet from primary school! It's very brittle, so i put it in that tiny box.
I collected these over two trips, on beaches whose location I won't share because they're relatively unknown despite being on an island normally busy with tourists. I also found some of the seaglass there, and that weird seashell that's covered in layers and layers of calcium deposit from how long it has been drifting around.