Kyawthuite Price and the Rarest Mineral in the Universe

Kyawthuite has no market price, because it has never been sold. Only one stone is known: a 1.61-carat (about 0.32 gram) reddish-orange gem cut from a waterworn crystal found near Mogok, Myanmar, and now held by the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (Kampf et al., Mineralogical Magazine, 2017). That single stone also makes kyawthuite the best answer to “what is the rarest mineral in the universe?”, with one caveat: nobody has surveyed the universe, so the honest wording is “the rarest mineral anyone has described”. This page explains why a price cannot be quoted, shows what the nearest comparable gems fetch per carat, ranks the real rarity candidates, and lets you run your own numbers.

Kyawthuite price: why no one can quote one

A price needs a sale, an auction result or a dealer quote. Kyawthuite has none of these. The stone is the “holotype”, the reference specimen that scientists used to define the mineral, and the paper says it is deposited in the Los Angeles museum collection. No sale of the stone has been reported. Science writers describe the value as priceless (ScienceAlert), which is a polite way of saying the market has not set one.

Infographic

From market stall to museum in 5 steps

1. 1BuyIn January 2010 Dr. Kyaw Thu bought two waterworn crystals at Chaung-gyi, near Mogok, thinking they were scheelite.
2. 2CutHe faceted both; the orange stone had a different lustre and a much higher density.
3. 3TestX-ray diffraction at the GIA laboratory in Bangkok matched a synthetic compound, BiSbO4.
4. 4DescribeKampf, Rossman, Ma and Williams described it from the one 1.61-carat gem; the IMA approved it as 2015-078.
5. 5StoreThe gem was deposited as the holotype at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.

Figures such as “$1 million per carat” that circulate online are guesses. If a second crystal turns up and is sold, that sale would set the first real price. Until then, the useful question is not “what is it worth?” but “what do the closest comparables sell for?”, which the next section answers with dealer and auction ranges.

The story of the stone shows how a find becomes a mineral. In January 2010 the Burmese gemologist Dr. Kyaw Thu bought two waterworn crystals at the Chaung-gyi gem area north of Mogok. He thought both were scheelite, a tungsten mineral. After cutting them, he saw that the orange stone had a different lustre and a much higher density. The Gemological Institute of America laboratory in Bangkok ran an X-ray diffraction test, which matched a synthetic compound, bismuth antimony oxide (BiSbO₄). He then passed the gem to the authors for a full description (Kampf et al., 2017).

The International Mineralogical Association (IMA), the body that approves new mineral species, approved kyawthuite as IMA 2015-078. The paper was published in 2017. The mineral is named for Dr. Kyaw Thu. Its hardness is about 5 to 5.5 on the Mohs scale (softer than a quartz grain, and far softer than ruby or a diamond), and its density of 8.256 grams per cubic centimetre is about three times that of quartz. Its chemistry suggests it formed in a pegmatite, a coarse-grained igneous rock, even though the crystal itself came out of river gravel.

What comparable rare gems cost per carat

A carat is 0.2 gram, so a 1.61-carat stone weighs 0.322 gram. Dealers price rare gems per carat, and the price rises steeply with size, colour and clarity. The ranges below come from gem retailers and auction sites, not from independent appraisals, so treat them as asking levels rather than certified values.

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Asking price range per carat, rare gems and diamond

US$ per carat, asking ranges read 26 October 2026 (dealer and auction-site pages; painite from science-press quotes); not appraisals

Taaffeite, a purple-to-mauve gem, averages $1,500 to $2,500 per carat according to the auction house Gem Rock Auctions, with top stones reaching $35,000 (asking prices, page read 26 October 2026; Gem Rock Auctions, taaffeite). Musgravite, its rarer relative, mostly lists at $30,000 to $35,000 per carat on the same page (asking price), and a 16.05-carat stone from Sri Lanka is listed as sold for $800,000 (retailer’s claim), or about $49,800 per carat (Gem Rock Auctions, musgravite). Painite, the gem Live Science ranks next to kyawthuite, is valued at up to $60,000 per carat by the mineralogist George Rossman (Live Science); ScienceAlert gives $50,000 to $60,000.

For scale, the musgravite page quotes a one-carat white diamond at an asking range of roughly $1,300 to $16,500 (Gem Rock Auctions, read 26 October 2026). So the rarest gems sell at the top of the diamond range or well above it, even though diamonds are far more heavily marketed. Rarity alone does not set price; demand, colour and cut size matter just as much, and most of these minerals are bought by a few dozen serious collectors.

Applied to a 1.61-carat stone, those comparables give a rough band of about $2,400 (taaffeite average) to about $97,000 (painite at its high end). That is an illustration of the market for similar gems, not a valuation of kyawthuite. A one-of-a-kind type specimen with a scientific paper behind it could sit far outside any such band.

Work out a rare gem’s value yourself

The calculator below multiplies carats by a price per carat that you enter. It also converts the weight to grams, shows the price per gram, and compares the stone with the same weight of neodymium-praseodymium oxide, a rare earth product priced by the kilogram (see the USGS figures further down).

Rarest mineral in the universe: the ranked candidates

How we ordered them: kyawthuite is first on a hard count (one stone). Painite has no specimen count, and the musgravite and taaffeite counts come from different years, so those three are ordered by how often the sources call them the rarest. We list only minerals whose rarity is documented in a journal paper or a major science publication. Counts for gems other than kyawthuite come from gem-trade sources, because no official body keeps a running tally, so they are approximate and can change when new material is found. For a wider list that includes minerals ranked by locality count and by market, see our guide to the top 10 rarest minerals on Earth.

Kyawthuite sits first because the count is one and no second crystal appears in the sources read for this page (Live Science, ScienceAlert and the Wikipedia entry, checked 26 October 2026). Painite was once the textbook “rarest mineral”, but Live Science notes that it is now found more easily and no longer wears that crown; according to Live Science it is still unusual because it is the only known mineral in which boron and zirconium are bonded in nature, and it has only been found in Myanmar. Musgravite was named for the Musgrave Ranges in South Australia, and the same retailer gives small and inconsistent counts for recent finds (it says 8 gem-quality stones since 2005). Taaffeite is the only gemstone first identified from a cut stone: Richard Taaffe noticed it in October 1945 among cut stones from Sri Lanka that he bought from a Dublin jeweller (Wikipedia). Its official name since 2002 is magnesiotaaffeite-2N’2S, and musgravite is a related member of the same group.

Two cautions apply to any ranking like this. First, specimen counts are gem-trade estimates, and the same mineral can look rarer than it is because only the cut stones are counted. Second, a mineral can be abundant in one tiny place and still be unseen elsewhere. Rarity in the sense of “known from very few places” is different from rarity in the sense of “worth the most”, and the next section shows why scientists prefer the first.

How rare is rare? What the mineral data show

The best-cited scientific study of the question is by Robert Hazen of the Carnegie Institution and Jesse Ausubel of Rockefeller University (American Mineralogist, 2016). They define a “rare” mineral as one recorded from five or fewer localities, counted as mineral districts in the Mindat database, and find that at least 2,550 species meet that test, which is more than half of the more than 5,000 IMA-approved minerals at the time (Hazen & Ausubel, 2016). By the same account, fewer than 100 common minerals make up more than 99% of the crust by volume.

Kyawthuite is the extreme end of that tail, with one locality and one stone. The IMA-CNMNC list counted 6,226 valid minerals in August 2026, including 1,153 old names grandfathered in before the IMA existed (IMA-CNMNC list via Wikipedia), so the number of “rare” species has grown since the 2016 study. Counts differ by source because some lists include questionable names and some do not.

Hazen and Ausubel give four reasons why a mineral turns out rare: it forms only in a narrow pressure, temperature and chemistry window; it needs scarce elements; it breaks down quickly in air; or it is simply hard to spot because it is tiny or sits in hard-to-reach rock. The fourth cause is a warning for rarity rankings. A mineral that is “known from one place” may only reflect where people looked. They also note that precious gems such as diamond, ruby and emerald are found at many localities and sold in commercial quantities, so they are not rare in the scientific sense.

Can anyone name the rarest mineral in the universe?

Not with certainty. Every mineral described so far was found on Earth or in material that reached Earth: meteorites and samples returned from the Moon. Hazen and Ausubel mention meteorite minerals such as hutcheonite and allendeite, described from the Allende meteorite, and point out that such microscopic phases may be less rare than their short locality lists suggest, because finding them takes expensive electron microscopy. The paper also notes that other rocky planets and moons in our solar system look far simpler in mineral terms than Earth.

So the claim “kyawthuite is the rarest mineral in the universe” really means “it is the rarest mineral in the official list”. The sky and the deep Earth may hold stranger minerals that nobody has sampled. The elements inside every mineral were made in stars. Gold, for example, began when dead stars collided, a story explained in the video below.

The same caution applies to elements. Astatine is often called the rarest naturally occurring element, and the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Chemistry in Its Element episode quotes an estimate of less than 50 milligrams in the top kilometre of the Earth’s crust (Royal Society of Chemistry). It is so scarce because all its isotopes are short-lived; the longest-lived, astatine-210, has a half-life of about 8 hours, and it forms only as a minor product of uranium decay.

▶ How gold began in dead stars and ended up in veins on Earth, explained in clay. · 4:16

Rare earth elements: scarce in name, common in trade

Searches for the rarest mineral often drift to “rare earth elements”, a group of metals used in magnets, phosphors and catalysts. The name is misleading. The USGS states that rare earths are relatively abundant in the Earth’s crust, but minable concentrations are less common than for most other mineral commodities (USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026). Hazen and Ausubel make the same point from the mineral side: thousands of tons of these commodities are produced every year, so they are not rare in the sense that kyawthuite is.

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Rare earth mine production, selected countries, 2025

Metric tons of rare earth oxide equivalent, 2025 estimate; world total 390,000

What is concentrated is mining. World mine production of rare earths reached an estimated 390,000 metric tons of rare earth oxide in 2025. China produced 270,000 metric tons, about 69% of the total. The United States produced 51,000 metric tons, Australia 29,000 and Burma (Myanmar) 22,000 (USGS, 2026; 2025 figures are estimates). World reserves are more than 75 million metric tons, of which China holds 44 million and the United States 1.9 million. The gap between a country’s production and its reserves is why governments watch this market closely; see our rare earth elements map of deposits and countries for where the ore sits.

Rare earth oxide prices per kilogram

For readers who searched for a price, here is the one the USGS publishes. The 2025 average prices were $69 per kilogram for neodymium-praseodymium (NdPr) oxide, $73 for neodymium oxide, $74 for praseodymium oxide, and $1.00 for lanthanum oxide (USGS, 2026). The heavy rare earths cost more: dysprosium oxide averaged $239 per kilogram and terbium oxide $1,010 (USGS, rare earths, heavy). These are 2025 averages for oxides at 99% to 99.99% purity, not spot quotes; check a pricing service such as Argus or Fastmarkets for today’s figure.

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Average rare earth oxide prices, 2021 to 2025

US$ per kilogram, annual averages

Compare that with gems. Terbium oxide, one of the costliest industrial rare earth products, is $1,010 per kilogram, or about $1 per gram. A gram of painite at $50,000 to $60,000 per carat is $250,000 to $300,000, more than 200,000 times as much per gram. That is the difference between a metal that is mined in tens of thousands of tons and a mineral that exists as a handful of stones.

How to check any rarity or price claim

1. Find the original paper or listing. New minerals are published in journals such as Mineralogical Magazine and American Mineralogist, with the IMA approval number. Search the mineral name with “IMA” to see the approval note.
2. Separate specimens from localities. “Only one specimen” and “only one locality” are different claims. Ask which one the page means and who counted.
3. Look for a sale, not an asking price. A price is real when an auction result or invoice exists. Dealer listings are asking prices, and some are placeholders.
4. Check the date. Counts such as “10 known stones” from 1982 are stale. Treat any gem count as a minimum and ask when it was last updated.
5. For commodities, use a statistical source. The USGS publishes production, reserves and average prices each February, with the previous year’s data marked as an estimate.

The same habit protects you in mining. When a company or article gives a grade, a resource or a “world’s largest” claim, ask for the report, the date and the method behind it.

Finding rare minerals from orbit

A single gem like kyawthuite cannot be seen from space, and no satellite can find one stone in a river valley. What satellites can do is map the rocks, alteration and structures that go with mineral systems, so geologists know where to send a field crew. Farmonaut’s satellite mineral detection service takes a licence boundary as a KML, KMZ or polygon and returns target zones from multispectral and hyperspectral satellite data, ahead of any resource estimate. You can read how it works on our satellite mineral detection page, send a mining query, or contact the team. For background on how an exploration programme goes from desk study to drilling, see our guide to mineral resource estimation.

The hero image at the top of this page is a Sentinel-2 satellite view of the Chaung-gyi valley where the kyawthuite crystal was bought, taken from open European Space Agency data. Alluvial gem ground like this is mapped by rivers and gravels, which is something satellite imagery shows well, even when it cannot show an individual crystal.

▶ What a spectral signature is and why short wave infrared does most of the work in satellite mineral mapping. · 1:49

Frequently asked questions

How much is kyawthuite worth?

No one can say, because it has never been sold. The only known stone (1.61 carats) is a museum type specimen. Comparable rare gems sell for roughly $1,500 to $60,000 per carat on dealer and auction sites, but those figures are a market context, not a valuation.

What is the price of kyawthuite per carat or per gram?

There is no price per carat or per gram. A carat is 0.2 gram, so any per-carat figure divides by five to give a per-gram figure. For example, $50,000 per carat is $250,000 per gram. Use the calculator on this page to try your own number.

How many kyawthuite crystals are there?

One is known: a 1.61-carat faceted stone described in 2017 and held at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. No second crystal appears in the sources read for this page (checked 26 October 2026).

Can you buy kyawthuite?

Not the type specimen, which belongs to the museum collection. A lab-grown bismuth antimony oxide with the same formula exists, because the paper notes that BiSbO₄ crystals have been grown synthetically, but it is a synthetic and not the natural mineral.

What is the rarest mineral on Earth?

By specimen count, kyawthuite: one stone, from near Mogok, Myanmar. By the scientific locality measure, at least 2,550 minerals are known from five or fewer places (Hazen and Ausubel, 2016), so kyawthuite is the best-known member of a very large group rather than a unique case.

What is the rarest mineral in the universe?

No one knows. Every mineral described so far came from Earth, meteorites or returned lunar samples. Among those, kyawthuite has the smallest documented supply. The universe as a whole has not been sampled.

Is painite rarer than kyawthuite?

No. According to Live Science, painite ranks second after kyawthuite and is now found more easily than it once was. Painite is still valued at up to $60,000 per carat.

Is taaffeite or musgravite rarer?

Probably musgravite, though the counts are not like for like. A gem-trade source counts 20 faceted musgravite stones identified between 1967 and 2006, and puts taaffeite at about 10 identified stones in 1982, with more found since. Musgravite also sells for more per carat on the same source.

What is the rarest element?

Astatine is the usual answer for naturally occurring elements: an estimated less than 50 milligrams sits in the top kilometre of the Earth’s crust, according to the Royal Society of Chemistry. Its longest-lived isotope has a half-life of about 8 hours.

Are rare earth elements actually rare?

No. The USGS describes them as relatively abundant in the crust. They are hard to find in minable concentrations, and about 69% of 2025 mine output came from one country.

How many minerals are there?

The IMA-CNMNC list showed 6,226 valid minerals in August 2026. In 2016, more than half of the then 5,000+ approved minerals were known from five or fewer localities (Hazen and Ausubel).

Can satellites find rare gem minerals?

Not individual stones. Satellites map rock types, alteration and structures, which helps narrow where to explore. A gem find still needs sampling and cutting by people on the ground.