How to Make Crystals at Home

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Any substance that has a very highly ordered internal molecular structure is defined as a crystal. For example, the difference between glass and crystal glass is just in the orderly structure of their internal molecules. This orderly structure gives them tremendous hardness, and diamonds, one of the hardest materials known to man gets is hardness because of this.

Yet there are other forms of crystals that are not as hard, and can be made at home itself. The simplest examples are sugar crystals and salt crystals. The basic tenant behind how to make crystals is to dissolve a material, and then evaporate the solvent so that the material is left behind. This evaporation is done over days and weeks, sometimes even months, and because of this the molecules of the material get deposited in orderly structures.

Making simple crystals is very simple, and we shall take alum as an example of this. Take alum and dissolve it in water, dissolve as much as you can. Heating the water a little is good because it increases the amount of alum that you can dissolve in water.

Then leave it overnight to settle, and pour out the water alone into another clean jar without transferring any of the sediment at the bottom. Take one of the best looking crystals from the sediment as the seeding crystal, tie a string to it, and leave it suspended in the solution.

Leave it like this and over the next few days you will see that the size of the crystal is increasing. Depending on the size of the jar and how much alum you have dissolved in it, you may get a small one, or quite a large one.

The growing will cease when you take the crystal out, or when all the alum gets deposited on to the growing crystal leaving behind a hanging crystal at the end of the string.

This is the simplest, and the most effective way of growing crystals, and you can follow the same procedure to make sugar crystals, salt crystals etc. If you want to make crystal beads, or chandelier crystals, it’s a little more complicated because you cannot dissolve glass in water. Yet the manufacturing process is basically the same.

This may not be a guide on all about crystals, but as a simple home tutorial on how to make crystals, is effective, and works.

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