On lab grown bismuth crystals, the edges of the hoppered crystals are fully developed, but the interior spaces are not filled in. This results in what appears to be a hollowed out step lattice formation, as if someone had removed interior sections of the individual crystals. In fact, the "removed" sections never filled in, because the crystal was growing so rapidly that there was not enough time (or material) to fill in the gaps. The interior edges of a hoppered crystal still show the crystal form characteristic to the mineral, and so appear to be a series of smaller and smaller stepped down miniature versions of the original crystal.