The Curator
Creighton Beery grew up field collecting in Austin’s caves and aquifers, finding calcite and celestite specimens alongside his father. It was an early, hands-on introduction to minerals that started well before he understood what made a specimen exceptional.
That understanding came later, through museums, and then through the Tucson show, where he began to see that minerals exist in a hierarchy. Quality, rarity, and form determine a piece’s importance, and that importance is what the market ultimately prices. He had always been fascinated by markets, and this collided directly with his passion for crystals.
He started attending shows and buying seriously at nineteen. After college he co-founded a cybersecurity company and spent five years building that business, but minerals never left the picture. Business trips to China became opportunities to visit mines and meet the dealers and miners who actually source the material.
After a decade of collecting and dealing on the side, he made minerals his full-time work. Today he travels to remote parts of the world to source exceptional specimens directly.
Minerals are foundational to life itself, connecting humanity to every other form of life on the planet. Lost Gems exists to bring a few of the finest examples of that connection to people who see it too.