Rubellite
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Rubellite is a variety of the mineral elbaite from the tourmaline group and is processed into precious gemstones.
Only known in Europe since the beginning of the 18th century, when Dutch merchants brought them from East Asia, these gemstones won the favor of buyers and interested parties.
Rubellites occur in all shades of red, from light pink to deep dark red, and are the more popular the closer they resemble the rubies of good color . Chemically, rubellite, like all tourmalines, is a boron-containing magnesium-aluminum silicate of a very complex structure. Its hardness is 7 to 7.5.
Rubellites grow in mostly elongated prisms with a triangular cross-section. Like all other tourmalines, they have a strong dichroism : the color changes in intensity when you look through the stone from different angles.
Until the end of the 1920s, rubellites came in abundance from Russia , from the sites in the Ural Mountains . In Yekaterinburg (formerly Sverdlovsk) was the headquarters of the grinding industry for Ural tourmalines, under which the "Siberian Rubellit" was an almost ruby red kind, a worldwide prized rarity. Today the USA , Brazil and Madagascar provide the most rubellites.
The most famous rubellite, a red tourmaline, is the "big ruby", the king Gustav III. of Sweden donated to Catherine the Great of Russia in 1786 . Under Tsarina Catherine the Great , the development of Siberia was advanced and during her reign the Ural tourmaline was discovered and with it the "Siberian ruby", the rubellite.
