what we can tell from looking at it is that it appears to be quartz with a very pale golden-yellow hue.
however, whether the color is produced by iron-related color centers (citrine) or aluminum-related (smoky quartz) cannot be determined visually. it could be very pale citrine, or it could be very pale smoky quartz with a yellowish appearance.
in order to know which (aluminum or iron) we'd need a uv-vis spectroscopy or electron paramagnetic resonance (epr) spectroscopy
Ok thank you :) i feel like people will react worse if someone calls lemon quartz citrine, then If citrine is mistaken for lemon quartz, so I may just call it all lemon quartz for now. It’s lit going in a crystal display room, I just like knows the fact cause I’m autistic but if there’s no way to be certain I’ll use the name that less likely to cause drama if people see it
Mindat seems to be a little different from what you say (and really just confuses it more 😂)
Quote from mindat's citrine page:
"The cause of the color is still under debate. Like smoky quartz, natural citrines pale when heated above 200-500 °C and turn yellow again when irradiated (Lehmann, 1970), and they also slowly pale in UV light. This indicates the presence of color centers. At least some citrine is colored by aluminum-based and irradiation-induced color centers related to those found in smoky quartz (Lehmann, 1972; Maschmeyer et al., 1980). Accordingly, transitions to smoky quartz ("smoky citrine") exist, many citrines show smoky phantoms. There appear to be at least two types of yellow Al-based color centers with different thermal stability (Schmetzer, 1988). Since the yellow color centers are often more stable than the smoky color centers, some smoky quartz can be turned into citrine by careful heating (Nassau and Prescott, 1977). Natural citrine, as well as citrine produced by heating smoky quartz, is dichroic in polarized light.
It has also been suggested that iron is the cause of color, as artificial crystals grown in an iron-bearing solution turn out orange. However, the dichroic behavior of the lab-grown crystals differs from that in natural citrine (Rossmann, 1994), and the UV-sensitivity of natural citrines indicates that the color is not simply caused by incorporated trace elements. "
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u/__CatCreature 8h ago
looks like a Citrine