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Paraiba Tourmaline

These cupriferous tourmaline from the Mina da Batalha in the Federal Brazilian State of Paraiba are small, rare and precious. Their spirited turquoise to green colors are such as are not found in any other gemstone in the world. The exclusiveness of this legendary find makes these rare gemstones real treasures.

Paraiba – the word has a particular fascination for the connoisseur, for it is the name of a gemstone with blue to green tones of extraordinary vividness. It was not discovered until very recently, that is to say in the 1980s. The world has one man and his unshakable belief to thank for the discovery of this unique gemstone: Heitor Dimas Barbosa. Tirelessly, he and his assistants spent years digging in the pegmatite galleries of some modest hills in the Federal Brazilian State of Paraiba.

Green Tourmaline

The tourmaline is a unique miracle of color. The gemstone comes in green, red, blue, yellow, but there are also colorless specimens and black ones. Often two or more colors are found in a single tourmaline crystal. Also rare and very highly esteemed are tourmaline which appear to change their color and cat’s eye tourmaline. Having said all that, green is regarded as the classical tourmaline color. If you ask a gemstone merchant about a tourmaline, green, in most cases, is the first color he will think of.

However, even among the green tourmaline there is a broad spectrum. Some of them are very light, others so dark that the green color can only be recognized when the stone is held against the light. There are green tourmaline in fine leek hues, but also in intense yellowish-green, olive green and brownish-green nuances. And there are especially wonderful tourmaline in the range from blue-green to dark bottle-green. These, indeed, are its best colors. They are rare and much sought-after. Green tourmalines are very popular as precious stones among women, but many men like wearing them too.

Semi Precious Stone Topaz Ring

Pure topaz is colorless and transparent but is usually tinted by impurities; typical topaz is wine- or straw yellow, pale gray, or pink. They may be made white, gray, pale green, blue, pink or reddish-yellow and transparent or translucent.

Yellow topaz is the traditional November birthstone, the symbol of friendship, and the state gemstone for the US State of Utah.

Blue topaz is the December birthstone and Texas state gemstone. Topaz very rarely occurs blue naturally. Typically, colorless, gray or pale yellow material is heat treated and irradiated in order to turn it blue.

Mystic topaz is colorless topaz which has artificially treated with a thin film/coating giving it the desired rainbow effect, and is not a naturally occurring topaz

Yellow Tourmaline

The tourmaline is a real miracle of colour. It not only comes in green, red, blue, yellow, colourless and black, but also as a multi-coloured or colour-changing gemstone or as a cat’s eye. There are, furthermore, innumerable mixtures of colour, in all nuances and depths, and some very unusual tones too. However, until recently, there were no pure yellows in the rich colour range of the ‘gemstone of the rainbow‘, as this stone is also known. Most of the yellow tourmalines found thus far had a slight tinge of brown. But the tourmaline not only has many different colours; it is also good for a surprise now and then, as for example at the beginning of the 1990s, when some fantastic blue-green to turquoise tourmalines suddenly arrived on the market from a find in Paraiba, Brazil.

Meanwhile, this colourful gemstone has taken the world by surprise again with another new variety, and this time it is a yellow one: in southern East Africa, in Malawi, a gemstone deposit with some wonderful yellow tourmalines was discovered in the autumn of 2000. The fresh, springlike yellow of these tourmalines is clear and pure and has just a very fine hint of green. Under the trade name ‘canary’, the new tourmaline variety has now begun to circulate.