Cinnabar has a slight lead over quartz and I'm not happy about that! This is the start of a *long* thread for #TeamQuartz which I'll be updating throughout the day.
Quartz is my all time favourite mineral. Despite its simple formula (SiO2), it can be found in a variety of colours and morphologies 1/?
Vote for quartz here: https://www.mineralcup.org/2023/campaigns/round-1-match-2
A fact for the #etymology nerds! The word quartz describes one of its physical properties. It comes from the German word "Quarz" which has origins in various Slavic words for "hard" (e.g., Czech "tvrdý", Polish "twardy", Serbian/Croatian "tvrd"). Quartz is a pretty hard mineral as it's 7 on the Mohs hardness scale