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You Have to Have Faith
This is your flash reporter from inside the tourmaline temple in Mars Pa. The outside of this sacride place looks much like any other small two story red house with a big front porch and a flat roofed dormer built in 192 ,but inside the emotions of hundreds of...
My Little Blue Tourmaline Just for Me.
With working on my site and the pandemic's disruption of available blue tourmaline rough, my tourmaline world has become more uncertain and less productive. Still I want to share a long awaited color event that helps keep me on the quest for more beauty in tourmaline...
Culets and keels and a chip off the old block with tourmaline.
Chipping One of the most disappointing failures that can happen while cutting a tourmaline gem is for the culet or keel to chip. This can happen after you have partially polished the pavilion or while cutting the pavilion. Which varieties of tourmaline are prone to...
Clarity and how I see things.
Even though the world of diamonds and the world of colored gemstones share only the most basic of similarities, some of the grading of diamonds sneaks into the colored gem terminology used for tourmaline. The most egregious is the use of the whole list of acronyms...
Afghan mine run lot and a long path to a small gem.
At age 15, in 1962, I purchased my first faceting machine. I cut a relatively small number of mixed varieties of gems into my twenties. Running out of money for the hobby and facing many other obligations for my time, I did not facet again until a little over 20 years...
Saturation change of different tourmaline (vividness) due to different light sources.
I have written about color change in tourmaline a lot on my website because the discovery of Laurellite, a cuprian tourmaline from Mozambique that has a reverse Alexandrite color change, is a principal reason for this site's existence. The strong effect of different...
Kenya, golden yellow/orange, and breaking up is easy to do.
Some relationships are not worth pursuing and other ones will stand the test of time. In 2020, the year of the virus, it became very difficult to obtain rough from the only supplier that has weathered all the storms for twenty years. I hungered for work and a breath...
Indicolite Indictment
A Tourmaline Tale of Sad and Glad by My Lady Pink This report is an attempt to bring the excitement and drama of a youtube video that went viral just a couple of days ago to a wider less connected audience. It focuses on the cutter’s behavior and its impact on an...
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