I have been working with Laura, my older daughter to try and get a page for selling selected stones on my website. Well it is together now and you can go there from the main page. I am not really selling cuprian tourmaline now, but I did get an inquiry about a reddish purple oval so I decided to send the stone to the GIA for a report on its copper content. I used a local jeweler that I have dealt with in the pass and I hope to get the stone back soon. It is a beautiful 2 carat oval that is eye clean and has a vivid color. I definitely saw indications of copper with my spectrometer though it could have been interference from manganese +3 since it has a lot of red in it. The report should resolve that question and permit me to value the stone realistically. I will be posting the results.
Bruce
About Bruce Fry
I was born in Summit, NJ in 1947 and graduated from Summit High School in 1966. I graduated from the Colorado School of Mines in 1970 and after spending another year in graduate school, I left to see the world of Brazil. After spending some more time discovering myself, I ended up working for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania for 32 years as an Air Quality Engineer in the Department of Environmental Protection. I retired in 2007 and took up faceting gemstones again after a long hiatus that reached back to my twenties. I had started cutting cabochons when I was 13 and bought my first faceting machine when I was 15, but ran out of money and time until I retired.
My great love in gemology is tourmaline and the collection presented here represents my effort to get as much beauty and variety in the colors of tourmaline as I can. I was particularly lucky in being able to get unheated cuprian tourmaline before copper was discovered in gem grade tourmaline from Mozambique.
