I was sitting at the computer and thinking about how to show off tourmaline in a simple post. I decided to grab a rainbow of droplets of color. I call small rounds that have no real claim to fame except their color droplets of color. The following is certainly not the best in each color, that will have to come with some study and maybe a few new pictures. None of these pictures have been color corrected and the Canon Rebel isn’t perfect. Other shades and levels of tone will follow because small rounds are the name of the game when it comes to showing off the exceptional range of color in our favorite gemstone. Size really doesn’t mater in this show, though the magnification produced by the camera is quite revealing of their flaws.
PURPLE
BLUE
GREEN
YELLOW
ORANGE
RED
Bruce
About Bruce Fry
I was born in Summit, NJ in 1947 and graduated from Summit High School in 1966. I graduated from the Colorado School of Mines in 1970 and after spending another year in graduate school, I left to see the world of Brazil. After spending some more time discovering myself, I ended up working for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania for 32 years as an Air Quality Engineer in the Department of Environmental Protection. I retired in 2007 and took up faceting gemstones again after a long hiatus that reached back to my twenties. I had started cutting cabochons when I was 13 and bought my first faceting machine when I was 15, but ran out of money and time until I retired.
My great love in gemology is tourmaline and the collection presented here represents my effort to get as much beauty and variety in the colors of tourmaline as I can. I was particularly lucky in being able to get unheated cuprian tourmaline before copper was discovered in gem grade tourmaline from Mozambique.
