A very nice stone, good pics, im guessing ur stone is about in the 2ct. range, & the fact that the pic is in daylight shows well. I think the color on my stone shows darker because it is photoed under lights, not natural & the cut of my stone is different than the stone in ur ring. The fact you have a nice stone & show it is great-better than a vault flower. Its a treat to see something so natural bring so much pleasure just to look at-again, a very nice item-steve...

Thanks Steve. It's a 2.89 ct stone and I LOVE it in the sunlight!

So neat to read all of this information. I sold a Paraiba Tourmaline during a Le Vian trunk show last April that went for 20k and it was well over three carats. After reading all this it seems like that was quite a steal.

It was absolutely to die for. One of a kind Le Vian Couture ring...if only I had pictures!

I've seen the LeVian paraiba tourmalines . . . that was an amazing price. Usually for $16K you get like a little baby 1 ct tourmaline and maybe .40 ctw diamonds!

First off...gold has never been found in Paraiba tourmaline. This is a silly rumor that spread like wildfire across the internet and can now be found on every two-bit webiste that mentions "paraiba". It was first published in the MinRec magazine(Vol 33)that the German Gem foundation had found small amounts of gold in Paraiba tourmaline...well guess what??? The paper the MinRec quoted it from makes not one mention of gold anywhere in the paper and when the German Gem Foundation was contacted about this they had no idea where that erronous information came from. Hundreds to thousands of paraibas have been tested by XRD and LA-MS-ICP by tons of major labs and independent researchers and not one example has ever been found to contain gold even in the smallest amounts.
This piece of false information, that paraiba contained gold, is now on multiple websites and is quoted by people all the time yet it's the hydra that won't die.

Second....Paraiba is one of my favorite stones. It is also the one stone that I got ripped off more on than any other as well as the most expensive rip-off that ever happened to me.
You MUST have your stone tested by a major lab or independent researcher that has the means of else you will get bitten.

Thirdly....I realized that paraibas have turned into the biggest marketing ploy and scam that the gem world has seen in a long time. 95% of all paraiba look no different that a regular tourmaline colored by iron but the fact they have copper is used to market the stones and fetch a higher price.
Iron produces the exact same colors as copper in paraibas.
Copper just happens to be a better chromophore than iron so when the amount is right and all things come together it can really make a stone pop(glow). This is only seen in a small fraction of all copper bearing tourmalines. In the batalha mine the best stones where found 30 meters down in an area called the heitoria trend. Once these were mined out back in '91-'92 the world lost what a real paraiba is. After that only a handful of stones from Mauvco, Nigeria, and Brazil ever had the "glow" that was seen from the trend in Batalha.

some fine examples of what a paraiba looks like

The well known Africagems.com stone


From the MinRec magazine

Thanks for the informative posts Amguy and always love your paraiba pictures.

I have one of those "supposed to be cuprian from Brazil but turned out to NOT be copper bearing and most likely is from Mozambique" tourmalines that I got a while back. BUT it still is a pretty stone and I hope to have it set someday. It does glow in some lighting, but nothing like the "real" Paraibas. It is quite large and had I been "educated" about the price of true Paraibas when I purchased it, I would have known it wasn't the real deal. It wasn't cheap, but it wasn't thousands of dollars a carat either.

I feel confident that the stone in my ring in my avatar is a Mozambique cuprian (copper bearing) tourmaline, as it came with a GIT cert (which is a reputable lab). As I stated earlier, it has medium saturation, which means that it can wash out in direct bright sun or extremely harsh lighting, but in any indoor lighting that I have seen it in, it glows like crazy and beings I only wear it for special outings, I'm still extremely pleased with how it looks.

It it was a perfect specimen, I would never have been able to afford it, as it is 3.49ct, so the price would have been WAY out of my range.

I have two "Paraiba" matching cabs that I am sending off to AGL to verify if they are copper bearing or not and I'll post photos and results when I get them back.

The pics labeled from MinRec mag look like Windex blue to me.

The one labeled Windex doesn't look a thing like Windex!

Is the term from Windex as in the window cleaner? Was Windex blue/green when the term was first put out there?

The hydra is alive and well-Ive talked with several sellers & people at businesses about the gold content and the stories are around that small traces of gold were found from the brazillian material. Weather this is based on fact or not, now is history but the possibility is that gold content was a serious idea at the time the stone was introduced, and some think the gold story has some clout-steve...