Tourmaline is for sure my favourite gemstone, it comes in the most amazing array of colours and even mid quality stones look fantastic but won't break the bank either. It's mined pretty much on every continent and comes in just about every colour.
Back in the 1500's somewhere in what is now Brazil a conquistador discovered a brilliant green stone and just assumed it was an emerald. Gemmology was a much easier science back in those days, green stone equals emerald, red stone equals ruby, blue stone equals sapphire. Actually what he'd found was a tourmaline and his confusion would live on for 300 years until tourmaline was finally identified as a separate mineral species sometime in the nineteenth century. Who knows how many of the emeralds that were sent to Spain from the new world were not actually tourmalines.
Brazil is also home to the flourescent blue green paraiba tourmaline, none of which is pictured above as its way out of my stone budget. Discovered in the 1980s, paraiba tourmaline is highly prized for its amazing electric blue green colour, the rarity factor further pushes the price up and it is routinely the most highly priced tourmaline on the market.
One of the other highly sought after tourmaline colours is the pink red called rubellite. Amusing story surrounding a pink tourmaline - about the size of a walnut and called caesar's ruby because it's thought to have belonged to Augustus, it was given to Catherine the Great by Gustavus III of Sweden. How the Swedish came to have it from the Romans is a mystery. It was supposed to encourage Catherine to let him marry one of her granddaughters. Well she kept the stone and kept the granddaughter as well, but Gustavus had the last laugh when many many years later after the Russian revolution someone took a closer look at the stone and discovered that its actually just a tourmaline. Its kept in a museum underneath the Kremlin armoury along with the rest of the jewels of the State Diamond Fund that escaped being sold off after the revolution. You can go take a look at it next time you're in Moscow.
