One of my other hobbies is working in the garden and working in the garden to me is getting into dirt. The color, smell and feel of a rich topsoil can be very satisfying. So perhaps this is why I like brown. It goes with everything and it can kind of grow on you.
This brown tourmaline is cut in a Barion cushion and that mixes the two dichroic colors of a lighter tan and honey brown together very well. This makes an exciting stone that seems to radiate flash. I certainly would not want to cut a smaller gemstone than this size (1.24 carats) because the facets would be too small and the work unrewarding.
I will leave brown behind and dravite and call its color butterscotch. It is eye clean and with excellent crystal. But best of all for a brown, neither dichroic color is greenish or too dense.
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.
