One of the most beautiful varieties of quartz and the most well known as a gemstone, amethyst gets its color from a tiny amount of iron. To a certain extent, the more iron, the deeper the purple. Some of the amethyst from Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada, goes to the iron extreme, where extra iron as the mineral hematite adds red to the purple. Another extreme for amethyst is in its size, not the crystals themselves, but in how it occurs. You can fit yourself inside one of the giant amethyst-lined geodes found in Uruguay. Amethyst has been a famous gem since ancient times, and back then they thought it had special properties. The most well-known myth of the time was that if you drank wine from an amethyst goblet, you wouldn’t get drunk. That probably didn’t work out too well! It must have been a strongly held belief, though, because the name amethyst comes from the Greek for “not intoxicate”!