Tourmaline Artical

Tourmaline, with all its beauty and splendor, is really just a trash mineral, mineralogically speaking, that is.

The name tourmaline has a Sinhalese origin and means “stone of mixed colors”. This is evident in many tourmaline crystals. Some are different colors when viewed along the length of the crystal, grading from pink at the bottom to blue at the top (there are many color combinatins). Some show a “watermelon” effect when a crystal is cut in cross section with the outer layer being green and the inner layers are pink. The “watermelon” effect is not limited to those colors. The can be transposed or even different colors such as blue, black, clear, green, or pink on the outer layer and pink, green, yellow or clear on the inside. And to make matters more confusing, the center can be multiple colors with triangular patterns, and even triangular patterns of alternating colors. One of the crystals we just got in shows this.