The Tourmaline Family
Tourmaline is often formed in long thin three sided crystals, that’s why you so often see tourmaline cut as long rectangles. It suits the shape of the crystal without too much wastage when cutting the gemstone.
It is a well-known fact that a lot of tourmaline has two or more colours in it when this happens it is called pleochroism.
Tourmaline has a wide range of colours, some special colours of tourmaline have special names and sometimes two colours can be joined together but the usual colours of tourmaline are just referred to as their colour:
Pink tourmaline has many shades of pink and the ladies love this gemstone. There is Yellow tourmaline and Colourless tourmaline. Watermelon tourmaline has an outer green rim and a pinkish center – Just like a slice of watermelon, can be sliced, faceted or cabochon’d. Green tourmaline is nice and bright and comes in all shades of green. Black tourmaline is sometimes called Schroll. Dravite is also called Brown Tourmaline and can be dark yellow to brownish black.
Tourmaline has sub groups under the name Elbaite and are as follows:
Indicolite
is a blue tourmaline. It can even be a dark blue colour, bright blue indicolite tourmaline is quite expensive.
Verdelite
is green and includes Chrome tourmaline which is a very dark green and has the mineral chromium present.
Rubelite
is a certain shade of reddish pink tourmaline. It is a valuable tourmaline due to its special unique colour.
Achroite
which is generally colourless.
Paraiba tourmaline
has many colours and has the mineral copper to be called True Paraiba.It is mostly a pale green or blue or a mixture of the two colours.
