Green Tourmaline Engagement ring via Etsy
The October birthstone Tourmaline is your’s if you’re born in this month. Happy Birthday to you 🙂
Tourmaline has been known since antiquity in the Mediterranean region, but it was only in 1703 that they brought it from Sri Lanka to Western and Central Europe. The Dutch gave the new gems a Sinhalese (being from Sri Lanka) name, Turamali, which is thought to mean ‘stone with mixed colours’.
While tourmaline has the largest colour range of any gemstone, most people are probably familiar with pink and green tourmaline. Tourmaline is indeed in Madagascar, Brazil, Afghanistan, Pakistan and some East African countries.
Green tourmaline is very popular; the dark olive or bottle green colours are the most easily available, and therefore the most affordable. However, the most desired variety is called chrome tourmaline, being similar in colour to some emeralds.
But it’s really pink which is the most popular of all the tourmaline colours: the pinks can range from deeply saturated pure-pinks, through to some colours of brown or salmon. In some markets, any deep-pink tourmaline is called ‘rubellite’ (misleadingly) – for it to truly be rubellite, it needs to have a scarlet-red colour to the stone.
The most expensive is the paraiba tourmaline, an electric blue-green stone seen here, originally found in the Brazilian district of Paraiba. Its supply is very limited, so prices are sky-high!
Paraiba Tourmaline and Diamond Double Halo Ring from Blue Nile
Which is your favourite tourmaline colour?
Pink tourmaline is the most popular of all tourmaline colours, and I’ve found another beautiful ring from Cassandra Goad to showcase it:
Ms Gingham says: Absolutely stunning!!! Love all the information in this post too!
About Pascale: Pascale Helyar-Moray, Founder and Director of StyleRocks has fourteen years of financial services experience as a marketing and communications professional working with blue chip companies in Australia and the UK. Maternity leave forced her to re-examine her career options and in looking for a business she could run from home, created StyleRocks in order to harness her lifelong passion for jewellery.
My engagement ring is a tourmaline, I fell in love with the shade of green when I first saw it. I had never before heard of Tourmaline being the birthstone for October, only Opal and Zircon. A happy discovery though.