About Us
The Citrine Circle was born out of a lifelong passion for crystals and minerals by husband and wife team Emma and Stu. We know that not everyone is lucky enough to have a local crystal and rock shop (certainly not in the UK!), so we opened an Etsy Shop at the start of 2018, with a focus on customer service, and honest and accurate selling so you know that what you see is exactly what you will receive. We wanted to have a shop that sells beautiful crystals that we would want to have in our own collection, whilst helping our customers to learn more about the history of these beautiful stones.
We also love to go and mine our own crystals whenever possible - the Oregon Sunstone you see for sale has all been dug by us, along with other various crystals that we offer up for sale occasionally. Cutting and polishing is a newer passion as we finally have a machine, and Stu in particular has been creating gorgeous freeforms and slices that have been wonderful to be able to offer to you.
We love getting to show you all our new finds, and if you have the time, join our Facebook group where we do live previews before every website update, so you can get to know the crystals (and us!) , see everything up close, and maybe even learn something new about them! Our group can be found here: www.facebook.com/groups/thecitrinecircle
If you are ever interested in something we don't have on the website, do get in touch as we have new stock coming in all the time from our frequent supplier trips. Make sure to follow us on Facebook and Instagram, as we often share exclusive offers on new crystals before they even make it to the online shop!
We also have a growing set of resources in the 'Resources' tab on to help you learn more about crystals and how to work with them, plus how to spot fakes and make sure you know what you're buying. We also created a free Crystal Guide App for both Android and iOS that is packed with both geological and metaphysical information for over 370 different crystals. Find out more about it here.
As on online retailer, we find it really important to be as eco friendly as possible. Our top priority is ensuring your crystals arrive in perfect condition, but also in a way that has as little impact on the planet as possible. We use box suppliers who create our boxes out of recycled materials, and our padded envelopes are from FSC certified sources.
A little bit about how and why we do things - from Emma
Personally, I don’t like buying things online, and as strange as it sounds, I had never bought a crystal online before. For this reason, when we started The CC, one of the main things that was important to me was making sure it was as easy as possible to feel comfortable in what you were going to buy. I’m incredibly fussy, and it takes me ages to decide on anything I want to buy - what size is it going to be, what does it look like, is that the exact one I’m going to get or have you just used a stock photo? Stu on the other hand is an internet shopping convert, he won’t even buy his clothes in a shop so he can try them on, he just orders them online! So between us, I like to think we strike a fairly good balance with the website. There are some things it’s just impossible for us to list individually, like tumbles, as we simply don’t have enough time or storage to lay them out and photograph them individually. However my fussiness strikes again - even though we hand select them all wherever possible at suppliers, even when we get them back to the shop, I’ll still go through them and pick out the best ones whenever I’m picking out orders.
Our website pictures also aren’t the snazziest, and that’s on purpose. Don’t get me wrong, I’m always conscious of the glorious colourful, saturated popping photos you see on IG, Etsy and FB - often the crystals look so yummy you want to eat them! However real life is rarely as beautifully polished and colourful as social media makes out, so we'd much rather go with photos that are as realistic and accurate as I can get - I much prefer to have people tell me that a crystal looks so much better in real life than to hear someone is disappointed because it’s not as good as the picture implied.
We’ve struggled a lot over the years with the dilemma of “free” shipping. From a sellers point of view, free shipping is never free. On a personal level, we're still suckers for an Ebay purchase that states it’s got “free shipping”, but all that really means is that postage is included into the cost of the item. And that’s fine if all you’re buying is one item, it works out the same if an item is £15 plus £3 shipping or £18 with free shipping. But as soon as you buy more than one item, you’re paying shipping costs twice. Sure, some shops break it down so they build the cost of the postage into 2 or 3 items, so if you buy enough to break the “free shipping” threshold then you’ve paid enough extra to cover the shipping costs for them. To be honest though, that’s just too much like hard work for us. We’d rather just say how much an item costs, then you can either get it shipped, or put it in a hold box and build up a parcel over time, and just pay shipping once. You pay it in one form or the other anyway, so we’d rather just be upfront about it!
Anyone who’s been a customer of ours for a while will also notice that we don’t run regular sales, we just try to keep our prices reasonable all year round. We don’t like to use the sales tactic of inflating prices to start with, just so you can then offer an amazing sale and slash the price to what it should have been to start with, just to make it seem more appealing. We do run a couple of genuine sales a year, one on my birthday and one on Stu’s though, and I promise we don’t hike the prices beforehand!
We also love a good loyalty scheme, so we're very excited to be able to offer our own - sign up to earn money off and free crystals! Find out more about it here.