Elbaite Tourmaline

Unknown Owner

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This is a large, lucious, deep raspberry pink, "mushroom cap" Elbaite from the Palelni Mine in Burma. Rarely do we see these shapely "mushroom style" Tourmalines from Burma of this size! The morphology of these is captivating and unique with their central, larger crystal with numerous, divergent, crystals tightly packed in parallel growth against the main one. There is an ethereal translucency to the raspberry pink exterior skin and a darker ghostly interior can be seen for added intrigue and aesthetics. Looking down the c-axis, a faint triangular shape is evident, also unique to these. It has an overall satin luster with the thin, parallel, component prisms having a higher luster resulting in a fan-like scintillation of sparkles along the length of the crystal. It's also lightly speckled with tiny Muscovite crystals too. Super unique and attractive - better in person as these subtle features are hard to convey! It is quite likely this piece has never been cleaned, and perhaps more of them from this old find (1990s) had such surface features, that were lost in some cleaning and preparation techniques.