Elbaite with Lepidolite

Unknown Owner

Help improve this recordNo owner is registered for this specimen yet. If it's yours or you know more about it, you can add the owner, provenance, publications and other details.

Although long-known to have produced colourful tourmalines, the broad Alto Ligonha Pegmatite Field in Zambezia Province, Mozambique has furnished very few fine, gem quality individual crystals with what one would consider great colour and clarity. This miniature individual Elbaite crystal is small in comparison to some other gem tourmalines from other worldwide sources, but for Mozambique it is truly exceptional. Extremely glassy, its vibrant tri- or even quad-coloured zonation is perhaps not as vivid as some Brazilian tourmalines, but here it works exceptionally well, grading from a peachy orange-pink base upwards, through a short sherry-orange section into pale lime-green and culminating in a pale strawberry-pink tip. Look closely at its termination and even with magnification you will struggle to spot even the slightest of imperfection, or chipping, and with a complex sequence of additional sloping faces it oozes character. Internally, it is inclusion-rich, but these do not block out the light, but reflect it internally, providing flashes of brilliance and patterns like a hidden world inside. Its base is a fracture surface where it was detached from matrix and around its lower edges are some tiny Lepidolite crystals and one or possibly two very small additional Elbaite crystals. This magnificent smaller Elbaite crystal is one of the finest ever to have been mined in the Alto Ligonha Pegmatite Field. The few higher-end crystals we have seen in the past are always claimed to be from the early 20th century, repatriated from older collections. We don't have the details of when this crystal was found, but based on previous evidence this is most likely from generations ago.