Exotic-sounding vanadium's 15 minutes of fame never came being eternally tasked as an alloying agent in steel. Very seldom has any lab bothered to reduce the compounds it's normally found in to its native state but, and here's where that fame might be warranted, vanadium may well top the list of rarest element found in its native state when a few specks of the isolated metal were discovered on the side of a Mexican volcano. You go vanadium! In the meantime, here's a little fruit of that rare lab effort when someone took the trouble to see what the metal actually looks like in pure form. And so attractive too these little leaf-shaped sparkling crystals.