On Pink Tourmalines from Araçuaí, Minas Gerais -- To Heat or Not To Heat

The tourmaline mines around Araçuaí in Minas Gerais are aptly famous for their pink tourmalines, although they have great greens, as well.

Pink tourmalines from Araçuaí are routinely heated because they often have a strong underlying brown tone. You can see examples of unheated and heated in this image taken in a dealer's office in Teófilo Otoni in March this year (click on the image to see the entire photo):


Generally speaking, many of these pinks look very light and washed out in daylight, but at night, under incandescent light, they have a wonderful color shift and change to a brilliant cherry color, although the brownish tone doesn't ever seem to be totally eliminated by heating.

In 2007, I bought an 18-carat oval for my mother -- IF at 30x -- and I had a terrible time trying to photograph it. In fact, I did not succeed. It looked just horrible in daylight, but at night -- wow!

Here is my best shot after several desperate attempts to manipulate the colors using Microsoft's Picture Manager, and it comes nowhere near doing justice to that stone:


On that same trip to Teófilo Otoni, I bought a 15-carat, peachy-pink, trillion-cut tourmaline that has something extra special about it that I have not seen before or since. As best as I can describe it, it was neon. And talk about not being able to photograph the particular beauty of that stone! Goodness! But I sent a message to a client in Rio de Janeiro, and he bought it sight unseen. When he received it, he sent me an e-mail to say that his eyes had fallen of his head when he saw it. It is nice when you have clients like that because if the sale had been based on a photo and not on trust, no one in their right mind would ever have bought that stone.

Copyright © 2009 N. Tenney Naumer -- All rights reserved.