Howlite Meaning, Uses and Care

What howlite actually is

Start with the mineralogy, because most of the bad advice about this stone follows from not knowing it. Howlite is calcium borosilicate hydroxide. On colour: None. Howlite is white with grey veining, and every other colour you see it in has been added.

Where it comes from: First described in Nova Scotia in 1868 and named for the Canadian geologist Henry How. Most commercial material is from California.

Hardness matters more than it sounds. The Mohs scale runs from talc at 1 to diamond at 10, and anything below about 5.5 can be scratched by ordinary window glass or by the quartz dust in everyday grit. At 3.5, howlite is soft enough to damage in a pocket with keys or in a bowl with other stones. Keep it separate.

What howlite is used for

Used for an overactive mind, for insomnia and for people who describe their anger as having no off switch. It is porous, soft and inexpensive, which makes it the standard beginner stone and also the most faked material in the shop.

In the shorthand most shops and books use, it is a Crown stone, and the three words attached to it most often are calm, sleep, patience.

Water, sunlight and salt

This is the section that matters, and the one most pages get wrong. Cleansing advice is handed around as though every stone were the same mineral, and it is not. Here is what howlite will actually survive.

Buying howlite without being had

This is the important one. Howlite is porous enough to take dye perfectly and is routinely dyed blue and sold as turquoise, or as howlite turquoise, turquenite or white buffalo turquoise. It is also dyed to imitate lapis, amazonite, malachite and red coral. If a turquoise piece is suspiciously cheap, suspiciously uniform and shows black veining identical to howlite's grey veining, it is dyed howlite. A cotton bud with acetone will lift the colour.

Two general rules that hold across the whole shop. If the price is far below everything else on the shelf of that size, something has been substituted or treated. And a stone sold with no locality at all is usually one the seller cannot trace, which in this trade often means tumbled, dyed and bagged somewhere a long way from where it came out of the ground.

The astrology people attach to it

Howlite is usually linked to Gemini, and to the Moon. Worth being straight about this: crystal and zodiac pairings are modern, they are not consistent between sources, and two reputable books will give you two different signs for the same stone. They are a useful organising idea rather than a tradition with a single lineage behind it.

If you want the part of this that does have a fixed method behind it, the Sun in Gemini sets out what that sign actually describes, and it is calculated from a date rather than assigned by a writer.

How people actually use howlite

1. Pick one thing for it to mean. A stone with four jobs has none. Calm is enough.
2. Put it where the thing happens, not where it looks good. A stone for sleep belongs by the bed; a stone for nerve belongs in the pocket you will actually reach into.
3. Handle it. The whole mechanism such as it is runs on the object interrupting you and reminding you of the thing you decided. A stone in a drawer does nothing.
4. Clean it by whatever method the table above allows, when it feels due rather than on a schedule somebody else set.

If you want something built from your own details

Every piece of howlite in the shop is the same stone with the same associations, which is both the appeal and the limit of it. A birth chart is the opposite: it is calculated from your date, time and place and it describes one person. If you do not know your birth time, this covers how to find it.