25 Tourmaline facts
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| Tourmaline bracelet |
- Tourmaline is a crystal silicate mineral compounded with elements such as aluminium, iron, magnesium, sodium, lithium, or potassium.
- Mineralogists gave tourmaline a variety of names, such as elbaite, tsilaisite, dravite, chromdravite, liddicoatite, uvite, schorl, achroite, buergerite, feruvite, foitite, povondraite and rubellite.
- Tourmaline is classified as a semi-precious stone and the gem comes in a wide variety of colors.
- Mohs scale hardness 7–7.5
- An Egyptian legend believes that as the crystals grew up from the earth, they encountered a rainbow and attained every color of the rainbow, giving the tourmaline gem stone a spectacular array of beauty.
- Tourmaline is the birthstone for October and corresponds to the astrological sign of the Libra.
- The name comes from the Sinhalese word "turamali" (ටුරමලි) or "toramalli" (ටොරමල්ලි), which applied to different gemstones found in Sri Lanka.
- An electrical charge can also be induced in some tourmaline crystals simply by applying pressure to the crystal in the direction of the vertical crystal axis.
- This effect is known as piezoelectricity, and found many uses in pressure measuring equipment and other scientific applications: Tourmaline was used in the production of pressure sensitive gauges for submarine instrumentation as well as other war equipment.
- Brightly colored Sri Lankan gem tourmalines were brought to Europe in great quantities by the Dutch East India Company to satisfy a demand for curiosities and gems. At the time it was not realised that schorl and tourmaline were the same mineral.
- The pressure gauges that measured the power of the first atomic bomb blasts were made with slices of this gem.
- Tourmaline is most often used in jewelry. However, because of its pyroelectric property, tourmaline was once used to clean dust out of pipes.
- Many gemstones in the Russian Crown jewels from the 17th Century once thought to be rubies are in fact tourmalines.
- The ability of this stone to look like other gemstones led to some confusions.
- The Paraiba tourmaline gem stone has been priced at over $5,000 per carat.
- The quantity of such green stones which were mined in the early days of the Portuguese colonization and sent to Portugal as emerald will probably never be known.
- In South America, where the majority of such gem-quality material is found, green tourmaline is still referred to as the "Brazilian emerald".
- In 1989, Brazilian miners discovered tourmaline unlike any that had ever been seen before.
- This new type of tourmaline, which soon became known as Paraiba tourmaline, came in incredibly vivid blues and greens, due to copper sulfate added to a tiny amount of gold as coloring agent.
- This last Empress of the Ch'ing Dynasty loved this stone so much that she bought enormous quantities of it when a new mine opened in California.
- Also in the United States, mines in California began producing bright pink and multicolored tourmaline around the late 1800’s to early 1900’s.
- Conversely, they are said to neutralize negative energies, and dispell fear and grief.
- One of the more unique styles of tourmaline gem stones is known as watermelon tourmaline. This occurs when a tourmaline gem stone’s cross section cut reveals green on the outside edges, along with a reddish, pink interior.
- Tourmalines are credited with the power to enhance one's understanding, increase self-confidence and amplify one's psychic energies, and aid in concentration and communication.
- There are three different species of tourmaline: Dravite, Schorl, and Elbaite. Dravites are dark yellow to brown/black. Schorl, which is the most abundant (95% of all tourmaline found), appears bluish or brownish/black to black. Elbaite consists of rubellite, which is pink or light red in color, indicolite, which is dark blue, verdelite, the green ones, and achroite, which is colorless.
