Zirconyx was born in 2021, primarily as a small attempt at fusing my interests in tech, research, writing, design, mineralogy and photography. I was a 16 year old, Grade 11 student when I requested my father to help me get started. In keeping with the fusion theme, I chose the word zirconyx as my site name, following which my father proceeded to procure the zirconyx.com domain, which, fortunately (and very surprisingly) was available.
Why mineralogy? It was a case of "coming for the books and staying for the stones". I've always been a very big fan of hardcover books; when I was age 12, during a local book fair in my city, I happened to see a tall-and-wide hardcover on semi-precious stones; My interests are largely tech oriented and I wasn't particularly interested in stones at that time, but the photographs on the cover (and inside) looked so good that I wished I could have that book. Fortunately, it was available at a steep discount and my mother bought it for me. While thumbing through the book later, I found the images of a few of the inexpensive stones that my mother possessed. I was hooked and that book served as the initial trigger for more reading and study of as many minerals as I could physically lay my hands on. Over a period of time, I'm told that I've become quite good at identification, chemistry and source analytics of a whole lot of minerals.
I hope to be posting articles related to minerals whenever i get time in between my studies. If anybody happens to randomly land on this site and finds a few articles informative, I would be extremely happy.
Thank you for your time!
-Ri