The yellow green weighs 3.54 carats and is clean and bright. Its crown is a simple two step cut.
This tourmaline is ready to give you a color fake and head for the “in” zone of your heart. It is not a Heliodor, which is a variety of beryl and is probably the most common gemstone in this gem’s color and tone range. Most people do not think of pastels, except pinks, when the think about tourmaline. If they think about tourmaline at all.
It is especially important to get the best polish on flat facets, to really enjoy a piece of pastel tourmaline. Pastels do not have the rich color to distract the eye from a lack lust polish and poor cutting. Unfortunately tourmaline is easy to polish to a certain point and that level has come to be accepted in the trade. To attain the the level of polish I demand is both more time consuming and more difficult to do. The difficulty develops because of the variations in polishing, that always causes the facets to move, between different colors and axis of tourmaline and the desire to maintain reasonably good “meets”. Meets are the intersections of facts.
I fully accept responsibility for “playing” with all angles on a tourmaline with the exception of the critical culet angles. I have spent days polishing a table and blatantly adjusted the angles of star facets around the table. I have over cut break facets around the girdle and rotated mains to keep reasonable “meets” etc. without seeing any difference in the final gemstones beauty. In fact,when I am desperate, I go for equal areas of similar facets rather than pushing meets to give the eye that sense of balance that I like in gemstones.
As I am writing this I am thinking about the critical angles on the culet of the tourmaline. I do not use critical angles on tourmaline gemstones that are less than 40 degrees and these are minor facets. I use only 40, 41 or 42 degrees on rounds and I always use 40 degree angles on emerald cuts. With these reasonable angles I do adjust them with polishing to suit my sense of balance and form.
The crown on this gemstone is a simple two step design. I like it because it produces bright gemstones, but it is quit revealing with regards to flaws. It also takes a lot of fiddling, which is done with polishing, for me to be sure that all the lines meet and make rows of the proper depth. Now even if I had a more sophisticated machine, I would still have to adjust because of variations in polishing tourmaline that I talked about above.
The fine yellow green oval appears to be eye clean and with fine crystal. Its medium light tone makes a gemstone that sparkles and it weighs 3.54 carats.
Bruce
Bruce
