Amethyst for Total Dummies

Natural amethyst crystals

Among the many limitations on the usefulness (not to mention accuracy) of the eHow.com canon was that no one ever made money saying, "That's not possible." After all, Demand Media expected 300-500 words with an introduction and three steps (all beginning with "action verbs"), so three words wouldn't cut it... even if they are true. Since the alleged editors at the site rarely, if ever, checked facts, it was easy for some of the more "creative" to publish utter bull for their stipend. That's how the site became peppered with articles like "How to Grow Amethyst Crystal" by Stephanie Williams, a post that now lives at Sciencing.com

Since the answer actually likes somewhere between "That's impossible" and "You could only do that in a very well-equipped laboratory¹"; it's highly likely that the J-school grad's instructions are, to be blunt about it, wrong. Then again, Williams pulled a typical eHow.com trick for her fifteen simoleons: she decided that the question was actually, "How to grow crystals," and never mind that whole amethyst thing; which goes right along with her use of an image of fluorite to illustrate a post on amethyst. Dumbass.
Stephanie's solution was to go to her bookshelf and read the Science Fun at Home chapter on making crystals with alum. Her sole nod to amethyst is,

"...add purple food coloring to give your crystals the color of an amethyst."

Now, we ask you friends, is that growing amethyst crystals? Or is it growing alum crystals that you've managed to color purple²? Would the crystals grown by this method be trigonal trapezohedons³? Would they have a Mohs hardness of 7? Would they have all they physical properties of quartz, including density, melting point, index of refraction...?
In a word, no: they would not be amethyst crystals. Leaf Group's attempt to lend legitimacy to this bullshit by citing an X-ray crystallography lab sheet on making crystals instead of an offline book only means that someone else at Leaf Group deserves a Dumbass of the Day award besides the one Stephanie's receiving.

¹ Lab-grown amethyst requires a supersaturated solution of silica and a high-pressure/high-temperature autoclave. It's not like you can do it in your microwave...
² Maybe she means equal parts of red and blue food coloring?
³ In fact, alum crystals are monoclinic...

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