Is it Glass or a crystal?

I've been going through my crystal collections recently, and trying to form more personal attachments to the stones. I ran across one the other day, and I'm honestly not sure if it's a real crystal. It appears to be Quartz, but it could also just be a piece of slightly cracked glass I got scammed with a couple of years ago... Are there any way I can test to see what this mystery stone is?

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Consider mineral tests. Hardness is the initial test many people use to determine quartz. It is among the hardest minerals, and will easily scratch glass. Most glass will not mar quartz.

Quartz has a hardness of 7, so though it is a relatively hard crystal, there are harder ones. Most normal glass is also almost entirely made from quartz, just melted down and cooled to shape with a variety of techniques to keep bubbles or other imperfections from forming.

So comparing quarts with glass is essentially comparing quartz to quartz. the only question is if it is a naturally formed crystal or a shaped figure. Natural quartz is rarely (like, -extremely- rarely0 perfectly clear. Common quartz is often somewhat cloudy in places, with internal cracks, not-quite even hexagonal sides, cricks, nooks, and other notches and shapes along the length from where it grew alongside other crystals, and sometimes smaller crystals and buds in patches along one or multiple sides.

So if it is symmetrical, polished smooth, and perfectly clear then it is likely a glass figure. but still quartz. just artificially shaped. if it has five sides where two or more are wider than the rest, and it has a bit of cloud, inclusions like dirt other crystals/elements cracks and such, then it is likely a natural crystal. If all of the edges are rounded and the surface is glossy smooth, but it still has inclusions cloud cracks etc inside then it was likely polished or tumbled but still could be considered a 'raw' crystal.

Either way it can still have some value energy-working wise. Shaped glass can be considered 'clean' mediums for channeling energy through them because, like sunlight through a magnifying glass, it easily focuses and directs energy like a laser beam. But for some reason (by my experience at least) it doesn't seem to hold on to programming very well if at all. However sticking something like a glass pyramid over another natural stone and putting them in the sun seems to really magnify the energy the natural stone puts out.

Meanwhile natural/raw crystals tend to be much easier to program and work with because they are in their natural state. They tend to hold energy well, and I like to think they have a bit more personality to them- but that's personal preference to aesthetics talking. The energy they put out tends to be more consistent though, if more calm and slower moving. because it is so much more programmable, raw quartz also tends to need a bit more care, as they tend to pick up other energies from wherever they are, so an occasional bath in some salt water or a moon bath is usually suggested if you work with them regularly.

If you have a UV lamp you can try this: since glass does not let UV radiation while quartz does, you can try to put the stone on your skin under the lamp. If it's glass, you'd get that spot on your skin shielded like you have solar protection.

Isn't glass made of sand? I prefer natural quartz even if it is damaged. It is just part of it's life. Just like all of us, slightly damaged.

oroboros, that is correct. Most commonly glass is made from sand melted down. Sand itself is primarily quatz as it is a very stable structure that breaks apart rather than dissolves in water and such. So while the substrates around the quartz can be broken down over many, many, -many- years the quartz tends to remain and gets ground up into small grains. becoming sand. ^_^

Of course the sand that you find on the beach has lots of other stuff mixed in with it, but it gets cleaned out and/or purified from the mix so that only quartz is left while the glass is being made.