From Erowid (where the picture is found):
Color photo of a large ultrapure DMT crystal, grown in 1996. The crystal is approximately 1 inch across.
Photo by Anonymous Photographer, Used by Erowid with permission.
From what I've read/heard over the years that
is a real crystal.
Buuuuuuut.....
It was not STB extracted from plant matter in a couple of hours & freeze precipitated overnight, that big sucker took some time & effort to
create!!!
1- it is supposedly
synthetic DMT,
not extracted from a plant, but synthesized from precursors in a lab setting. So it is
pure from the start & much, much more pure than anything we can take out of a plant.
2- it was grown in a lab as well. So the conditions for growth are very much more controlled than in our kitchens/closets & cleaner too. Imagine how much dust & other crap (that is small enough to be not be seen to the naked eye) has contaminated the cleanest kitchen-extract, by the time you do the whole process, freeze precipitate & grow a large crystal at room temp, over a few days.
A clean-lab does not have that problem. Plus they use
temp & pressure to grow
large crystals in a lab setting, not just time & evaporation.
Pressurizing the whole thing as it grows, would alter the shape of the resulting crystals a lot, I would think.
3- it is also magnified a bit. It says in the little explanation that it is "
approximately 1 inch across". It's about 5x that big in the photo.
So anyway, I don't know for 100% sure that it is real, again these are just the things I've read/heard over the past few years.
But I do know that under the cleanest possible
home-conditions, I've grown very large extracted DMT crystals that have the same exact dense, solid, clear crystalline qualities to them.
Although the round shapes of that one are like nothing I've ever seen, that doesn't mean it can't be coaxed into forming any shape possible using the right tools & under the right lab conditions.
That picture has been on the net for a long time now, so it's hard to say for sure anything about it I guess.
One last
very important thing to consider, is that
the picture itself...is also a really good
professional, or at least semi-pro photograph, with focused lighting, a dark, non reflective background & everything. That photo probably took an hour or so to set up
just right. They probably took a bunch of them too, at different angles & different lighting setups, what your seeing is only the best one.
Keep in mind that most of the pictures posted on these web forums are taken with somebody's shitty
phone-camera in a quick second, with no special lighting or any kind of special preparation.
Just the room, the crystal & the picture.
WS