Most blue tourmaline is on the green side of blue in the color wheel. The only other side blue can go is toward the purple and I have found that a blue/purple tourmaline to the hardest part of the color wheel to get in tourmaline. Without the discovery of cuprian in Mozambique I doubt that I would have any worthwhile blue/purples to show. Now many of the blues are grayed, but that has to do with a desaturated color and gray has no place on the color wheel.
This smaller emerald cut would like to be blue and I would like to give her the blessing. But when I compare her with more saturated blue gemstones, her place is not with them. Having a pastel tone level makes it harder to place gemstones in the color wheel, so I guess I can be forgiven for leading her on when I labeled her box with blue. She is certainly not grayed and certainly has many years of flashy clean living ahead of her. She weighs a trim 1.61 carats and has forgiven me for this revealing post.
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.
