With all the rough I have bought to enlarge the spread of color you would have thought I would have more maroon. Now maroon has a part of me since it was part of my high school colors. Maroon and white Fight Fight! Fight! and all those cheerleaders jumping around. If someone would advertise a maroon piece of tourmaline faceting rough I would probably be in line, if it had any chance of making a stone.
Having said all that I have less than a handful of really maroon colored tourmaline. This posted stone is one of the best. Its c axis is dripping in rich maroon and the a/b doesn’t fight it with a brownish cast. This lets the emerald cut be maroon without getting sort of wood-like appearance, as some of my other maroon do. There is some slight grading of the color in the long axis of the stone and I see a slight amount of chipping on the keel, but the body is of fine crystal and eye clean. It weighs 2.14 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.
