One of the gemstone varieties of beryl

, aquamarine is a beautiful blue-green color, like the color of the ocean in a tropical paradise. It’s often found in pegmatites along with schorl, almandine garnet, mica, and apatite. Aquamarine (and other beryls) is one mineral that almost always has a consistent shape, a hexagon (six sides), and that can be very helpful if you’re out hunting for rocks and want to find aquamarine. If you have to dig at all in your search for rocks, the rocks are often pretty dirty, so they all just look brown or gray. But if there’s any aquamarine in there, there’s a good chance it’ll be in hexagon-shaped pieces, so if you find a hexagon, you likely have a piece of “aqua,” as some people call it. The ideal aquamarine is a transparent gem, but it’s much easier for regular folks to find aquamarine that’s opaque

Not letting any light pass through—no transparency or translucency; for example, massive minerals and most rocks.

–it still has the cool shape and color, but you won’t sell it for tons of money! If you were lucky enough to be able to collect aquamarine in Gilgit, Pakistan, on the other hand, you could cash in big time–the aquamarine there is crystal clear and considered some of the most beautiful in the world.