How to Identify Minerals: 10 Steps to Mineral Identification

A good knowledge of crystals is very helpful once you're past the beginner stage, but often minerals do not display any crystal faces, so for simplicity's sake we'll ignore it. For beginners, a mineral's crystal form is less important than its cleavage (see the next step). When you're ready to learn this aspect of minerals, you'll want a book.

One thing even beginners can do, though, is to observe a mineral's habit, the general form it takes. There are more than 20 different terms describing habit—see most of them illustrated in the Mineral Habits Gallery.