The Pomegranate Jewellery Guide To Tourmaline

The breadth of this gem’s colour range is unrivalled making tourmaline a fantastic gemstone choice for colourful jewellery. Read on to find out more about tourmaline and why we love using them in our jewellery designs...

Introduction To Tourmaline

We love tourmalines and use them in so many of our designs due to the incredible range of colours they are available in, making them perfect for our handcrafted, colourful jewellery.

Tourmaline can be found in colours ranging from rich reds to pastel pinks and peach colours, right through to intense emerald greens, vivid yellows and deep blue, not to mention some superb high end reds and greens that we use in our Fine Gold Jewellery collections.

Discover some truly unusual and highly covetable hues of tourmaline in our Fine Gold Bonbon range of rings.

We particularly love mixing all the hues of tourmaline up to create highly individual, colourful pieces of jewellery, shown to great effect in designs which include Sara Splendid Tourmaline Earrings, Valentina Bracelet and Mughal Tourmaline Necklace.

A Brief History of Tourmaline

It is said that during the 1500s, a conquistador from Spain found green tourmaline in Brazil, which at the time, he mistook to be emerald. It wasn't until the 1800s that tourmaline was finally identified as its own mineral species by mineralogists.

The name tourmaline comes from the Sinhalese word for mixed gems toromalli and was applied by the Dutch traders to the multi coloured, pebble gemstones they found in the gem gravels of Sri Lanka.

The Brazilian discoveries of the 1980s and 90s really opened up the tourmaline market and heightened its appeal by bringing intense new colour tourmaline gemstones to the market.

Paraiba tourmalines were discovered in 1989 and their amazing neon blue and green hues electrified the gem world.  These are only found in the Paraiba state of Brazil and exceptional stones have fetched the highest prices ever for tourmaline gemstones.   

The Brazilian state of Minas Gerais is the largest producer of gem tourmalines of all colours.

Facts About Tourmaline

• Tourmaline is a durable gemstone with a hardness of 7.0-7.5 on the Mohs Hardness Scale, making it suitable for everyday wear
• Cat's Eye tourmaline is named because of the small parallel inclusions that when polished, resemble a cat's eye
• Tourmalines are fairly well distributed worldwide, which helps make the gemstones affordable
• Tourmalines make an excellent gemstone choice for carving
• Rubellite is a trade term for pink tourmaline as the top colours are ruby-like. Pomegranate examples include our Samiya Rubellite Ring and the Camellia Rubellite Ring
• Chrome tourmalines are those with a particularly vibrant green hue.
• Tourmaline can be colourless or pretty much any colour or hue known to man
• Tourmalines gems with a pink central zone surrounded by a green overgrowth are referred to as watermelon tourmalines.
• You may sometimes hear blue tourmaline being referred to as indicolite. as in this example Teal Blue Indicolite Ring
• Tourmalines are sometimes colour zoned and will exhibit two or more colours within the same stone.

Tourmaline Care Instructions

It's best not to expose tourmaline to extreme temperatures as they can suffer from thermal shock which can lead to a change in colour or to fracturing the gemstone.

Warm and soapy water is the best way to clean tourmaline and we would not recommend the use of ultrasonic or steam cleaners.

Take a look at our full range of tourmaline jewellery.