NEWSLETTEREarthWonders Newsletter #4
Published: 11.02.2025 Every week we bring you new EarthWonders features and mineral locality spotlights. What localities and features do you want to see next? Tell us at newsletter@earthwonders.com or ping us on Instagram. If you are reading this and haven't subscribed to the newsletter - subscribe now and tell your collector friends! If you missed the previous issues of the newsletter - you can read it here.
New Localities
We are bringing you new mineral specimens every day with over 75 000 items for sale, in private collections and museums!
Enjoy this week's localities that bring the most striking blue and purple specimens we've seen at the Tucson show so far:
Email us or Instagram us your favourite localities and if you can't find them on EarthWonders we will work on them next!
North Kivu TourmalineNorth Kivu produces amazing coffee beans but most North Kivu tourmalines are actually pretty ugly - lots of cracked brownish crystals and broken fragments. Sometimes though you get these absurdly perfect specimens, usually in pockets of decomposed feldspar where the crystal had room to grow. The best ones have this weird property where they look almost metallic green in sunlight but shift to a murky blue under fluorescent lights. Local dealers tend to hoard these specimens rather than sell them right away, since the mining is so sporadic due to the region's instability. The really distinctive thing about them is their shape - instead of the typical long pencil-like crystals you get from places like Brazil, these often form as short, fat prisms with really sharp terminations. Some of the miners say they can tell a good pocket before they even open it by the way the surrounding rock weathers.More from North Kivu 
Tanzania TanzanitesTanzanite is famous for its single location and how the whole market pretends that heating isn't universal. Don't get us wrong - tanzanite specimens are universally gorgeous! There is more to the process though as most stones going through Arusha start as muddy brown crystals that transform into that signature blue-violet after a careful bake. The best material actually comes from tiny secondary pockets off the main deposit, where the crystals form in open spaces rather than being crushed by the surrounding rock. Local dealers have this funny habit of grading stones by holding them up to the morning sun, swearing you can only see the true color at dawn. The most valuable pieces aren't always the pure blue ones that the big commercial dealers prefer - some collectors specifically chase stones with that subtle burgundy flash that appears when you tilt them just right. During the deposit's early days in the 1970s, some of the finest pieces were actually thrown away because they didn't match the standardized color grades that were being established. More from Tanzania Peru Pyrite - Green or Pink?Everyone's going nuts for those classic green Peruvian pyrites lately - you know, the ones that look like gummy bears. But here's the thing - the same mines are quietly producing these insane specimens where pink fluorite perches on mirror-bright pyrite faces. They're weirdly under-appreciated compared to the green ones, even though they're probably rarer. Maybe it's because green pyrite is such a classic "look" that people forget to check what else is coming out. Best part is that unlike some localities where it's all cloak-and-dagger, the miners there are pretty open about showing you around if you make the trip. Always worth checking what's in their personal collections - that's where you see the really wild stuff that never hits the market.More from Peru (and not just green) 
