Elbaite Tourmaline

Item Description

Long gone from the market, these special tourmalines came out in the 1990s and this was long in the collection of Bill Larson, nicknamed Burma Bill for his access and buying at the time. He built the largest and most important collection of Burmese minerals. This is a large, luscious, deep raspberry pink, "mushroom cap" Elbaite from the Palelni Mine in Burma. Rarely do we see these shapely "mushroom style" Tourmalines from Burma of this size! The morphology of these is captivating and unique with their central, larger crystal with numerous, divergent, crystals tightly packed in parallel growth against the main one. There is an ethereal translucency to the rich, raspberry-pink exterior skin and a darker ghostly interior can be seen in places for added intrigue and aesthetics. Looking down the c-axis, a distinct triangular shape is evident, also unique to these. It has an overall satin luster with the thin, parallel, component prisms having a higher luster resulting in a fan-like scintillation of sparkles along the length of the crystal. Super unique and attractive - better in person as these subtle features are hard to convey! Interestingly, the interior cores long assumed to be schorl tourmaline may instead be a much more rare tourmaline species, olenite, in many cases for material from this mine.