I love coloured gemstones and today I wanted to talk about pink gemstones. There are actually quite a few. For instance, the stones at the top of the blog are a pink sapphire, a pink tourmaline, and a rose quartz. There are also kunzite and rhodochrosite but the three I am going to discuss are tourmalines, morganites and rhodalite garnets.
Tourmalines are a beautiful gemstone and appear to be being used more in modern jewellery. They come in a big range of colours, probably the most of any gemstone – green, red, blue, pink, yellow, orange, black and so on. They also come in multicolours with the best known one being red/pink and green, called a ‘watermelon tourmaline’. The ring in the picture below is of a large faceted pink tourmaline with a seed pearl border. It was owned by the late Andree Elizabeth Shiel, a UK jeweller designer from the 1980s onwards.
Vintage ring with a central 4ct pink tourmaline surrounded by seed pearls
The second pink stone is a morganite. Set here in a lovely pair of day and night earrings (the faceted morganite stones can be removed in the day), you can see the beauty of the pink. Morganites are part of the beryl family of gemstones, along with emeralds, and aquamarines. Pink beryl was named morganite after J P Morgan, the American financier and banker. When a new source of pink beryl was discovered in 1910 in Madacascar, George Kunz, a gemmologist who worked for Tiffany & Co, suggested its name become morganite to recognise J P Morgan’s financial support for the sciences and the arts. Morganite is a pale pink colour and large stones are needed for the pink to be displayed in any depth.
The final pink gemstone is the rhodalite garnet which can range in colour from pink to a purple red. In the antique gold earrings below, the stones are a dark pink, almost purple.
In fact, these pink stones lead nicely into next week’s blog which will be about February’s birthstone, the purple amethyst.
navette jewellery 