Black Tourmaline & Herkimer Diamond Two-Stone Cuff Bracelet

Black Tourmaline is stable and safe to handle. A brief rinse is fine, but avoid prolonged soaking, which can work into fractures along its striations, and dry it fully afterward. Raw crystals are brittle and can have sharp, splintery edges.

Black Tourmaline takes its older name, schorl, from a tin-mining village in Saxony, Germany, once called Schorl and now Zschorlau, where miners found it beside their ore before 1400. It crystallizes from boron-rich fluids in granite and granite pegmatites, growing as long, striated columns rich in iron. It is by far the most common tourmaline in nature, mined worldwide from Brazil and Namibia to the mountains of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Black Tourmaline is schorl, the sodium iron endmember of the tourmaline group and its most common member, with the formula NaFe3Al6(Si6O18)(BO3)3(OH)3(OH). It crystallizes in the trigonal system as long prisms with deep lengthwise striations and a rounded triangular cross-section. Like other tourmalines it is piezoelectric and often pyroelectric, developing an electrical charge under pressure or when its temperature changes. Its black color comes from its iron content.

• Long before mineralogists could explain it, tin miners in the Saxon village of Schorl, today Zschorlau in Germany, were pulling black tourmaline from the ground beside their ore, and the village lent the stone the name schorl before 1400.
• When Dutch traders carried tourmaline from Sri Lanka to Europe, it earned the nickname Ceylonese Magnet for the way a warmed crystal would draw in hot ash and then push it away, an early glimpse of the electrical charge it still carries.
• In shamanic tradition tourmaline was carried for protection during ritual, and it was once used in turbulent times to point out the culprit behind trouble and show the right direction to take.