MUNICH MINERAL-SHOW 2018

So the Munich Mineral Show 2018 has ended. I don’t know, maybe someone discovered there for themselves (for sure someone noticed something) a lot of new material, but I didn’t notice it. No, there were rare topics, but somehow sporadically, on separate tables. For myself, I discovered blue barite from Romania, large crystals of barite from Morocco, tarbuttite, I don’t remember where, phillipsite from Patagonia, sapphirine (a real mineral, not blue chalcedony), mangano-calcite in the form of intergrown “reeds” from South Africa and something still little things. An unpleasant discovery was the growth of the “ennoblement” of the material: if earlier only the Chinese oiled the samples, now the Pakistanis, and even some Indians, have also done this. You come to other tables - the smell is like in the engine room ... The excitement at the Chinese tables, as once, was not observed. Either due to the lack of new material, or because they raised prices a lot a year ago. I understand that you can bargain three times, but how can you bargain 30 times? I specially photographed some of their trays with, in my opinion, exorbitant price tags. But something else is worse - following the Chinese, sellers from other countries have noticeably raised prices this year. A normal sample, not a micromount, now costs from 30 euros. Plus the cost of shipping, plus overhead, and you have to earn something ... Is it any wonder that worldwide sales of collectible minerals are declining. In addition, sellers cut dealer discounts - when everything is good, this does not happen. But let's not talk about sad things: six days of searching for an interesting product at an affordable price still gave a result, and I brought something, and something will come later. In the meantime, I'm posting a photo report from the exhibition for viewing. There was something to see.

Here is an example of a hazelnut-sized fluorite that was heavily jacked up by the Chinese, most likely irradiated to give it a blue color.

The entrance to the room of minerals glowing in the ultraviolet (not a sale, but just a decoration of the exhibition) was decorated so badly that many people passed by without having thought to look behind the black curtain.

A well-formed translucent crystal of fluorite the size of a head on a rock (part of a museum exhibition):

You have to be very careful walking down the aisles. A little turn away - and you can crash into a mammoth tusk on the move, as was the case with me - you barely dodged.