The terms gemstone and crystal are used interchangeably, but is there a difference? Why is it called “crystal healing” and not “gemstone healing”?
There is a huge overlap between these two terms, so many of the stones you might buy could be classified as either. On top of that, the term “crystal” is often applied to stones that do not actually have a crystalline structure. Confused yet?
Here are the basic definitions of crystal vs gemstone:
A crystal is any solid material in which the atoms are arranged in a highly ordered way. This includes emeralds and rubies, but also sugar and salt.
A gemstone is any material that is polished and used in jewelry. This includes crystals like emeralds, but also organic materials like amber, and glass like obsidian.
Here is a Venn diagram to help illustrate the overlap:
But, there’s more to it!
The confusion between these two concepts arises for two reasons:
- When people refer to “crystal healing”, they have long included stones like amber and opal and moldavite, not just actual crystals.
- In marketplaces like Etsy and websites like this one, we have to use whatever people type into search engines in order for our pages to be found. (This is also why there is so much mislabelling among gemstones).
So, that’s why you’ll see lots of websites refer to gemstones, gems, stones, and crystals as interchangeable words. What they really mean in either case is usually “any stone or mineral people use either for jewelry or for crystal healing or both”. “Gemstones” are more associated with jewelry and “crystals” are more associated with crystal healing, but they are talking about the same thing.
This website started out being about jewelry (hence the name), and then slowly the gemstone meanings sections took over our traffic. We realized that a lot of people interested in our content would be searching for “crystal meanings” and not “gemstone meanings”, so we made sure to use both as much as we could. That’s just how online content works these days!
