| | Chapite - Amorphous to tetragonal pyramidal | | Environment: Almost exclusively a pocket mineral but sometimes found in box-like clusters on drugstore and supermarket checkout counters or rolling loose in urban gutters. |  |  | | Color varieties. | Chapite crystals in pocket assemblage. | | Crystal Description: Usually in rounded prismatic crystals with rotatable bases and white, cap-like terminations. Also as a coating of other pocket species and even the pocket walls, especially when the chapite crystals are found with the capped terminations floating loose in the pockets or missing altogether. In its usual environment chapite is associated with lintite, loosechangeite and occasionally, matchbookite, which may alter to fizzleite after receiving a coating of chapite. | | Physical Properties: Commonly black-sided prisms, but also blue, red and other colors are found in the same occurrence. Sometimes fruit-flavored. Weight: 0.15 oz. Luster: metallic. Hard exterior surface but waxy interior typical. Waxy interior melts when left in an ashtray or glove compartment with the windows rolled up. | | Composition: a complex oxide of goop, grease and petrolatum. Tabular varieties contain bee's wax and are harder to open. | | Tests: Apply to chapped lips. If they feel better, it's chapite - if not, it's probably lipstick so watch out. Or it's an empty shotgun shell and you need to work on your field identifications. | | Distinguishing Characteristics: Chapite is the only mineral with a brand name appearing on the side of the crystal, and with a rotatable base. It is also one of the few species that may be bought in perfect, well-terminated, colorful crystals for less than two dollars apiece. | Occurrence: Chapite it is most commonly found among the contents of a pocket that have been dumped out on a night table, usually accompanied by loosechangeite and on occasion, gumwrapperite on which the chapite may have formed a thin coating. Chapite is usually a late mineral, being added to the pocket assemblage as weather conditions become hotter and drier. A tabular variety that resembles a foil-wrapped chocolate coin contains bee's wax, is difficult to open, and is less heat-resistant than the petrolatum-based crystals with the long prismatic habit. It is also more expensive and frequently, mentholated. One of the best single chapite crystals known, still bearing it plastic wrapper and a price sticker, was discovered in a Styrofoam coffee cup with a peel-back lid at the Emmons Quarry, Greenwood, Maine in the summer of 2005 just outside a newly exposed pocket containing large smoky quartz crystal clusters, magnificent hexagonal blue fluorapatites perched on ball muscovite, and vuggy albite. However the absence of other chapite crystals in the numerous pockets found there, and in other coffee cups, has created heated controversy centering on whether the chapite formed in the pocket, rolled out of a mineral collector's LL Bean goose down vest, or was glacially transported and discovered during the post-detonational desludgification (mucking out) process (PDDP). Further study is needed.
Warning: If cap not sealed, do not purchase. |
|  | Bi-color Chapite
|  | | Rare Chapa-Apatite |
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