Tourmaline (gemmy multi-color crystals)

Item Description

A fantastic, highly colorful old time Tourmaline specimen featuring beautiful multi-colored crystals, free of matrix. The piece is gemmy when backlit, allowing the colors to really come through. The main crystal has a glassy basal termination, with a glowing blue-green / green hue, which grades into more of a golden hue in the center, and if you flip the crystal on end, you can see there is a "watermelon" effect with a green outer "rind" and a pink "core". A couple of the accompanying crystals on the side of the piece are actually doubly-terminated, and feature vivid cranberry colored hues on the pyramidal terminations with a lighter green color the basal terminations. A wonderful, showy and unique crystal groups that surely dates back many decades. Specimen weight is 170.23 grams. From the collection of Vasco Trancoso, a medical doctor and prominent mineral collector from near Lisbon, Portugal (https://www.mindat.org/user-11954.html). He assembled his mineral collection over the course of 60 years, and built a fine worldwide display collection that we recently purchased. This piece is pictured on mindat.org at https://www.mindat.org/photo-187847.html