Who Decided That Rose Quartz Brings Love?

A brief history of modern crystal healing, the people who founded it, and the method by which stones acquired their “powers”

If you're drawn to spirituality but you've had enough of gurus and self-styled masters, crystals and manifesting, this column is for you: here we take the woo-woo apart and keep what actually works.

If you're looking for your stone and searching online, it's easy — and perfectly normal — to feel confused within five minutes: the descriptions all sound alike. Which stone is the most protective? Is amethyst the stone of Sagittarius or Aquarius? If I wear rose quartz, will the love of my life finally show up?

Amethyst calms the mind, black tourmaline protects, rose quartz opens the heart.

These descriptions are repeated on commercial websites and even on more serious ones, as if they were a thousand-year-old tradition, a truth with a precise match between stone and function. In reality, their origin is much closer to us, with dates and names attached.

For years, I too talked about stones as if what I read everywhere were true. If everyone says it, it must be true, right? Then I went looking for where it all came from, and what I found deserves to be told.

The Figures Who Shaped Modern Crystal Healing

Crystal healing as we know it today was born in the United States between the 1970s and 1980s: it's practically the same age as many of us. It grew out of the great New Age movement, which gave voice to a Western need to rediscover a bit of spirituality in a world that felt increasingly narrow. And it did so with the logic that belongs to our culture.

Marcel Vogel (1917–1991), a researcher at IBM, began studying the effects of thought on plants in the 1970s and, after leaving IBM in 1984, devoted himself to quartz crystals. His résumé gave the movement a scientific veneer.

Katrina Raphaell published Crystal Enlightenment in 1985 and, the following year, founded a school in Taos, New Mexico, that certifies therapists based on her own books. She had no training in mineralogy.

Melody published Love Is in the Earth: A Kaleidoscope of Crystals in 1991, the encyclopedia of metaphysical properties that is still the most cited today. Her stated background is in mathematics.

Judy Hall (1943–2021), an English astrologer, published The Crystal Bible in 2003, the bestseller that brought crystal healing into bookstores around the world.

None of these figures had specific credentials or experience to determine what a stone does to the mind or the body. They were authors and practitioners who built their own authority.

How Stones Got Their Properties

Beyond credentials and experience, what I find interesting is these authors' method of inquiry. How was it decided that one stone calms anxiety and another attracts luck? Reading their books and interviews, four main paths emerge.

The first is intuition. The authors meditated while holding a stone and noted their sensations, images and thoughts. It's easy to imagine that these intuitions weren't universal, but depended on their own experiences, their mood at the time and many other circumstantial factors. Some spoke openly of information received from the stones themselves, a kind of channeling. The result was then written down as a property of the stone, valid for everyone.

The second is color correspondence. Pink or green? Heart chakra. Black? Root chakra. Gray? A bit of confusion… It's worth noting that the system of seven rainbow chakras is itself a twentieth-century Western reworking: it will get its own article in this column.

The third is ancient folklore, often taken out of context, imprecise and full of gaps. Fragments of medieval lapidaries were recovered and mixed with Theosophy, with Edgar Cayce's readings and with yoga as filtered through the West. All thrown together, in short, with very little research. If you'd like a serious, in-depth book on the traditions surrounding stones, I recommend The Curious Lore of Precious Stones (1913) by George Frederick Kunz, Tiffany's gemologist.

The fourth is client testimonials: anyone who felt better after a treatment confirmed the property. No one knows what happened to those who didn't. No control group, no testing to separate the effect of the stone from that of expectation, relaxation and the relationship with whoever led the session.

In short: with all due respect to the scientific method, but with plenty of love and certainly a good nose for business. Stones are beautiful, fascinating and sellable, and a chart of correspondences was exactly what was missing to monetize them.

Add to this that the authors copied one another. And here's a practical example of something I've always said: what you repeat becomes what you believe. What one wrote was picked up by the others and, through sheer repetition, became “tradition.” That's why today you find the same sentences on every website and in every shop. Except when someone invents something new and confuses the algorithms.

Ancient Properties Tell a Different Story

Curiously, modern properties often don't match ancient ones. The lapidaries of Pliny the Elder, Marbod of Rennes and Hildegard of Bingen attributed precise virtues to stones, but different ones. Amethyst, for example, protected against drunkenness, an idea born from its Greek name, amethystos, meaning “not intoxicated.” The mental calm attributed to it today is a recent addition. And really: who wants to buy a stone to keep from getting drunk?

The Role of the Market

In the 1980s, crystals became a huge commercial phenomenon, and every stone for sale needed a property to tell its story. In marketing, these are called a “unique selling proposition,” “claims” or “bullet points”: I used them for years to sell blenders. Some stones discovered or brought to market only a few decades ago had a spiritual meaning stuck to them within just a few years, with no history behind them and not even an attempt at meditation. Tanzanite, for example, was discovered in 1967 and launched on the market by Tiffany; larimar arrived in 1974. Today both have detailed “property” sheets, as if we'd known them for millennia.

What the Research Says

Someone did try to test it, and the result was clear. In 2001, psychologist Christopher French of Goldsmiths, University of London, had 80 volunteers meditate while holding either a real quartz crystal or an imitation, without telling them which one they had. The sensations they reported were the same: tingling, warmth, a sense of well-being. What made the difference was each person's expectations and beliefs: the stone itself didn't matter.

I'll say it again, because it's central to the method of The Path of the Mala and in my book: it wasn't the stone that mattered, but what people expected to feel, what the object inspired in them. The magic, then, isn't in the stones, but in your mind and in the relationship you build with the object.

So What Do We Do with Stones?

Stones are beautiful, and that alone would be a good reason to surround yourself with them. They have fascinating geological and cultural histories, and they can become powerful symbolic reminders: an object that calls you back to an intention, a breath, a quality you want to cultivate. And that is tied to your intuition, to what the stone conveys to you — not to what Melody intuited on a sunny day in 1989. The power, the magic, lies in the mind that uses them, and that's exactly where practice becomes interesting and real.

Knowing where things come from makes us freer, and harder to manipulate. We can choose a stone for its beauty, its history or the personal meaning we give it, knowing exactly what we're doing.