One of the reasons that I got back into faceting after a many year hiatus was my love of color. I looked over the “new” world of the internet and decided that if I ever wanted to collect gemstones with outstanding color, I would have to cut them myself and tourmaline was the natural choice. I still cut a variety of stones the next five years or so before focusing on tourmaline. The two colors in the color wheel I most wanted in my growing tourmaline collection was a great orange and purple (particularly blue purple). Now I am not talking about golden oranges and reds that have a purple c axis. I mean citrus orange and a fine spinel to amethyst purple. The result of that quest for those colors and the complete color wheel brought forth this collection that I am writing about, to share with you.
This clean standard round brilliant cut tourmaline is a nice orange. It is dichroic, but not a golden orange or one that has a brownish cast. Oranges have a tendency to desaturate into brownish orange under many lighting conditions and those stones I would call dravite and are relatively common. This round has an even color because it was cut with the table perpendicular to the c axis ( looking down the end of the pencil-like crystal to see the c axis color). I just check the gemstone to see if it shifted into a pink world, but it seems stable. I have found a number of orange/pinks that change color in my opinion and even some for sale on the inter net. But I have never read an article on this interesting phenomenon. It is one color phenomenon that I would like to investigate with my spectrometer when I get a proper light source for it. The posted stone weighs 2.05 carats
Bruce
