Description
Rainbow obsidian sphere, cut and polished, measuring 53mm across and weighing 197g. Photographed exactly as it is, so the piece in the images is the piece that arrives.
Rainbow obsidian is natural volcanic glass. Lava cooled so fast that no crystals had time to form, and what set instead was glass carrying countless microscopic inclusions, lined up in layers as the lava flowed.
Light goes into those layers, bounces off them and comes back as colour. The colour is not a pigment and it is not a coating. It is the glass itself, doing something with light.
The bullseye, and the colour
Worth saying plainly, because the trade name promises more than most pieces deliver. This is not a stone banded in every colour of the spectrum. The name covers the sheen variety, and any single piece shows the one or two bands that happen to sit in it.
This rainbow obsidian sphere is purple. A deep aubergine ring, warming to a rose and mahogany band at its outer edge, sitting in glass that is otherwise black.
What lifts it is that the ring is a complete bullseye and it is well centred. The layers have been cut square through the middle rather than at an angle, which is what produces a closed circle instead of a smear or a crescent. Anyone who buys spheres regularly looks for this first, and most pieces on the market do not have it.
How the sheen behaves
The sheen is directional, and this decides whether you are happy with the piece.
Under a flat ceiling light the sphere reads as near black. Bring one light source in from above or from the side and the bullseye opens up, the ring tightening or widening as the sphere turns in the stand.
One lamp, a candle, a window with the sun off to one side. Overhead lighting will close it down every time, and that is the stone behaving normally rather than anything being wrong.
About this piece
The polish is mirror bright. Held up, it returns the room in it, which is the quality that put polished obsidian to work as a scrying surface long before anyone was selling spheres.
At 197g this is a proper hand weight rather than a pocket piece. It sits in a cupped palm with a little heft to it, which matters if you work by touch and by weight rather than by looking.
Traditional correspondences
Obsidian is worked with for grounding and for protection in traditional practice, and rainbow obsidian is usually described as the gentler member of that family. Where black obsidian is reached for when someone wants to go straight down, rainbow obsidian is reached for when they want to go down slowly.
The association with sight runs through all of it. Polished obsidian has been used as a mirror and as a scrying surface for a very long time, and the sphere is the form most often kept for that.
Correspondences are traditional and are offered as part of a practice, not as a substitute for medical or professional advice.
Caring for your rainbow obsidian sphere
Obsidian sits at 5 to 5.5 on the Mohs scale. That is softer than quartz, so keep this piece away from clear quartz points, amethyst clusters and anything gritty. Quartz will scratch it and the scratch will show on a polished surface.
It is glass, and it breaks like glass. A knock against a hard edge will chip it and a drop onto a tiled floor will very likely end it. Spheres roll, so give this one a stand or a ring and keep it back from the edge of a shelf.
Sudden temperature change can crack volcanic glass. No hot water, no cold windowsill straight from a warm room, no radiator.
Small open pits are normal in obsidian. They are gas bubbles that reached the surface during polishing and they are part of the material, not damage.
To cleanse, use sound, breath or moonlight. Water is not needed.
What you receive
The rainbow obsidian sphere shown in the photographs and the wooden sun disc stand it is sitting on, cut to hold this sphere at this diameter. Nothing else. Wrapped and posted by Royal Mail Tracked.
Browse the rest of the crystal spheres, or see everything currently in stock in obsidian.
For the mineralogy behind the material, Mindat holds the reference data on obsidian.
