Face up this standard round brilliant appears to have a nice even medium dark forest green (green with a blue touch), but it is hiding the truth. When I turned it over to check for inclusions/flaws etc. and rotated it, I could clearly see its tone value change threw the c axis color and the a/b axis color. So after seeing that this beautiful gemstone is eye clean and with fine crystal, I looked at the gemstone face up again. As I slowly turned the stone, I realized, as I now expected, that some angles of rotation produce a brighter flash than others. There was my confirmation of the stone having been cut with its table parallel to the c axis. I usually can clearly see four slice of pie segments, face up, on stones that are cut that way, but in this case the different colors/tone values mix so seamlessly that a casual look misses the effect. This neat and mysterious gemstone weighs 2.92 carats.
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.
