Paraiba Tourmaline has a quite recent history, started in about 1980s. It was found in the state of Paraiba and it is a very rare variety of Tourmaline, gemstone already present in Brazil in different colours.
The particularity of this variety, that fascinated the gemstone world from the very beginning, depends on the combination of two factors: its colours and its fluorescence which gives life to a unique and mesmerizing glow that appears to light up the stone from intensely even when there is very little light.
Paraiba tourmaline owes its extraordinary colour, often referred to as ‘electric’ or ‘neon’, to manganese, and copper, element which has never before been observed in a tourmaline; scientists, infact, speculate that the native copper inclusions took shape in the early stages of cooling, after the gems started to crystallize.
The interplay between these two elements gives rise to a special variety of beautiful colours: emerald green, turquoise to sky blue, sapphire blue, indigo, bluish-violet, and purple.
The extraordinary vividness of the Paraiba tourmalines does not reveal itself until the stone has been cut.
Paraiba Tourmaline was traditionally mined from Brazil, but today, after the exhaustion of the Brazil mineral resource, we have also two more mines where it is possible to find shining blue-green tourmalines: in Nigeria and Mozambique.
So, nowadays, the Paraiba Tourmaline is found in only 5 mines worldwide.
Due to the difficulty in exploration and extraction and so the scarcity of these gemstone, Paraiba tourmaline is one of the most sought-after gemstones in the world: there is only one for every 10,000 Diamonds. For that reason are very rare and coveted.
All these elements make this gem one of the most precious stones, incomparable to any other one, and infact currently, in the international market, they exhibit the highest quotations in the gemological universe.
