Color change chrome tourmaline
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Tourmaline is a crystalline boron silicate mineral compounded with elements such as aluminium, iron, magnesium, sodium, lithium, or potassium. Tourmaline is classified as a semi-precious stone and the gemstone comes in a wide variety of colors.
According to the Madras Tamil Lexion the name comes from the Sinhalese word “Thoramalli”, which is applied to a group of gemstones found in Sri Lanka. According to the Madras Tamil Lexicon, the Tamil “tuvara-malli” and Toramalli are also derived from the Sinhalese root word. This etymology is also given in other standard dictionaries including the Oxford dictionary.
Brightly colored Sri Lankan gem tourmalines were brought to Europe in great quantities by the Dutch East India Company to satisfy a demand for curiosities and gems. At the time it was not realised that schorl and tourmaline were the same mineral (it was only about 1703 that it was discovered that some colored gems were not zircons).
Tourmaline was sometimes called the “Ceylonese (Sri Lankan) Magnet” because it could attract and then repel hot ashes due to its pyroelectric properties.
Tourmalines were used by chemists in the 19th century to polarize light by shining rays onto a cut and polished surface of the gem.
Color change tourmaline
Color change is one of the rarer and more intriguing of gemstone optical phenomena. Unlike pleochroism, color change ability does not rely on viewing angle. With the color change phenomenon, colors can change when gems are viewed under different types of light such as daylight or incandescent light. Only rare gems which formed with multiple light transmission windows can exhibit the ability to color change.
To help understand the phenomenon, a red gemstone appears red because it absorbs all frequencies of light except for red but a color change gemstone that absorbs all frequencies except for blue and red will appear blue when light is rich in blue wavelengths, and will appear red when the light is rich in red wavelengths.
Although alexandrite is the best-known of color change gemstones, the color change phenomenon can also occur in rare specimens of sapphire, garnet and diaspore-zultanite.
Color change chrome tourmaline
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