Tourmaline (15-stone set)

Item Description

Tourmalines are highly colorful gems, found in all shades. Brazil has been one of the major Tourmaline-producing countries for decades, yielding stones of all colors. Here we have an alluring 15-stone set of "Marquise" cut Tourmaline gems ranging from blue-green to yellow-green shades, with slight variations in between. Most of the stones are notably clean, which is significant as Tourmalines are classified as a "Type-3" stone, meaning that most gems have inclusions, which are accepted by collectors and dealers, so eye clean stones are a real treat to find.
The name Tourmaline has been used in the western world since the early 1700s, and according to mindat.org, "The name "tourmali" was a generic name used in Ceylon [Sri Lanka] for colored gems, mostly zircons". Although, Tourmaline has been known for centuries, it wasn't fully identified until the 1800s. This is because Spanish explorers in the 1500s mistook green Tourmaline found in Brazil for Emerald, and it remained misidentified for a few hundred years. The irony is that black Tourmaline (Schorl) had been well-known in Europe, but it took mineralogists quite a bit of time to realize that the colorful gemmy crystals were part of the same mineral group as the opaque black crystals.