Shungite Octagon Plate | Medium

Older than almost anything you can hold.

Shungite comes from one place — the Shunga region of Karelia, in northwest Russia — and it's roughly two billion years old, which predates most complex life on earth. It's non-crystalline carbon, and elite shungite, the shiny black variety, is up to 98% pure.

It contains fullerenes: hollow carbon molecules shaped like footballs, whose discovery won the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Peter the Great established a spa on the shungite springs in 1719 and ordered his soldiers to carry a piece.

Shungite is worked with for protection and grounding, and it has a strong modern association with electromagnetic shielding — a claim that outruns the evidence, so we'll state it as tradition rather than fact. It sits with the root.

Sheri chooses every piece by hand, cleanses it, and charges it before it's packed here on the Gold Coast.

Raw shungite leaves black marks on hands and cloth."