All About Tourmaline

Tourmaline is the birthstone for October and the anniversary stone for the 8th year of marriage. Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon) was partly responsible for Tourmaline’s first appearance in Europe when Tourmaline gems were sold to Dutch traders who imported them to the West in the 1600s. The Dutch, aside from admiring Tourmaline for its beauty, first discovered that the gem possessed a unique property. Tourmaline when heated or rubbed creates an electrical charge becoming a magnet that attracts lightweight objects. The Dutch used these Tourmaline magnets to clean pipes as their magnetic properties attracted ash, and renamed Tourmaline “Aschentrekkers”, literally meaning one who treks through ashes. Today, Tourmalines special property, known as piezoelectricity, has been incorporated into modern technologies such as computers, musical keyboards, cellular phones and other hi-tech devices.

Tourmaline crystals occur in granite pegmatite veins occurring in the great gem mining districts of Minas Gerias in Brazil, and the East African countries of Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, Malawi and Madagascar. In the summer of 1998 a new Tourmaline deposit was unearthed near the city of Ibadan in Nigeria, West Africa, proving to be one of the most significant Rubellite Tourmaline discoveries in modern times.
Tourmaline comes in a variety of colors, pink, red, yellow, brown, green, blue, violet, black and multi-colored. Some of the well-known Tourmalines are Rubellite (red), Paraiba (electric aqua blue), Indicolite (neon blue), Green Tourmaline, Yellow Tourmaline and Watermelon Tourmaline.