WHEN YOU
LOOK
Western Bluebird
STIBNITE:
Humanity's Fuel
When you look at this stibnite, you see ambition.
These slender crystals from Iyo, Shikouku, Japan reveal little at first glance, but ultimately tell a story of the furtherance of human goals. Since ancient times, mankind has found a tremendous number of uses and ways to benefit from this mineral. Whether stibnite is valued for its own properties or the usefulness of its component element antimony, it ultimately represents humanity’s ambition thanks to this versatility.
Stibnite Sample from the Orma J. Smith Museum of Natural History
Beauty and Power
Historically, women in many cultures have used stibnite as a beauty product. In the central period of Roman history, women were known to use kohl, a mixture largely involving stibnite, to line their eyelids, color their lashes, or darken their brows. Stibnite in this way was largely used to encourage beauty, by amplifying female’s looks and making them more attractive. In this way, stibnite served as a way for these Roman women to express their ambition as it allowed them to further their own sexual and social standing in Roman society.
Roman art depicting female beauty. Images courtesy of Italy Magazine.
Alchemical Medicine
Stibnite found further applications in the pursuit of alchemy and medicine. One of stibnite’s component elements, antimony, was known to alchemists as a way to clean gold of its impurities and led them to suspect that if it could clean gold, it should also be able to clean the body. Although today stibnite is a known neurotoxin and similar in effect to arsenic, it was used even into the nineteenth century by physicians as a cure for all sorts of diseases, and often resulted in the deaths of patients. This use of stibnite as a medical device, while ineffective, reveals a goal that humanity has been chasing forever—the dream of living a longer life. The longer humans can reside on this earth, after all, the more they can do and the more they can advance.
A 1558 engraving entitled The Alchemist by Pieter Brueghel the Elder depicting an alchemical lab. Image courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Mines, War, and the Environment
During both WWI and WWII, antimony was used as an ingredient in industry and military developments, mainly as a way to strengthen other metals. This created a demand for domestic antimony production in the United States, which could be achieved through mining stibnite. One such mine is located here in Yellow Pine, Idaho and was at one point the most productive antimony mine in the U.S. Although it has been closed since 1997 and has gone through over seven million dollars’ worth of restoration projects, today the company Perpetua Resources, formally Midas Gold, is attempting to reopen this Stibnite Mining Area. This would not only reverse all of these efforts to reclaim the land after being devastated by mining for over a century, but also destroy critical habitat for the endangered Chinook salmon and bull trout. This is a steep price to pay, but it’s a price Perpetua Resources is willing to pay in their hopes that stibnite mining will make them a profit and further their economic goals.
