This is a beautiful gemstone without visible fault. I would hazard a guess of some kind of orange garnet, if I was pressed to guess, what this gemstone was without knowing. I like this standard round brilliant that weighs 2.32 carats. It’s clean medium rich tone without a dark modified (doesn’t brown out)is just right for this sized stone.
Now I am comparing a tourmaline with a garnet. Both tourmaline and garnet are large families of related species with varying gemological properties. Still garnets have a consistently higher index of refraction than tourmalines so they should be brighter. This is the case, only if they are given a comparable finish and have the same or better cleanliness. With my extra effort in polishing tourmaline, I think that this red orange tourmaline would stand up well in comparison to garnet cut commercially.
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.
