Tourmaline Trouble

[vistagrande]

In mid-November I was doing a show in Ventura during terrible weather. As a result of the storm, attendance was very low, the parking lot was a lake, the room was cold and the roof of the fairgrounds building leaked right by my space.

On the second day, things were a little better and we had someone looking at the tourmalines. I noticed that one of them looked “funny” — like maybe some lint had gotten under the glass lid of the box. Not too many minutes later, the customer had left and my daughter called my attention to the same stone. Unfortunately, it wasn’t lint. There was an ugly fracture running across the stone.

The stone had been fine initially. There were no “feathers” or other inclusions visible. It had not been taken out of the box and dropped. The stone had both pink and a bit of green — not enough or in the right places to be an obvious bicolor. But it seems the stone decided it was time to split the colors. Given the stone has concave facets, recutting it is going to be sad.

[gembug]

That's very sad to see. I have had several tourmalines commit suicide over the years in a similar fashion - no signs of flaws or anything untoward for years, then one day they've fractured or cleaved in 2. The saddest one was a cabbed bi-colour Afghan tourmaline with deep blue on one side and kelly green at the other end. It cracked *lengthwise* vs. across the colour divide! It's in my box of tourmaline sorrows