by: David Federman
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Paraiba
Tourmaline by: David Federman |
The world has lived so long with a six-digit Dow Jones average that it comes as
a shock to be reminded this bellwether index for the U.S. stock market didn’t
top 1,500 until 1983 and 2,000 until 1986. And when you are told that the
average sank to 577 in 1973 during a recession far milder than that of 1990-92,
your brain feels like a gong in a Buddhist monastery. Numbers that low are
just too bad to be true.
Now imagine the reaction of sound minds when quoted prices of more than $20,000
per carat for tourmaline. Of course, these prices are commanded not by an
ordinary garden variety fine tourmaline. No this altitude is reserved
exclusively for Paraiba tourmaline: a strain of neon-glowing tourmalines from
Brazil’s Paraiba mining district discovered in 1989. Numbers that high
were unheard of for so-called semi-precious gemstones in the past.
Paraiba prices are as close to paranormal as gem prices get. They have
defied gravity, conventional wisdom and a blistering recession in the most
important market for premium gemstones, Japan—any one of which should have kept
prices pinned down to four digits, like other tourmalines.
Granted, Paraiba tourmalines are magnificent by any measure, sporting at their
best electric teal and sapphire-blue colors that make them ravishingly
distinctive.
Natural Selection
When dealers first saw samples of the new-find tourmalines in early 1989, the
vibrant colors left them as much in awe as in doubt. Dealers thought that colors
that vivid couldn’t possibly be natural.
Given the possibility that a significant percentage of pink and red tourmalines
are irradiated, stones from Paraiba were bound to trigger trade skepticism.
Endowed with colors that evoked comparisons to peacock feathers and tropical
fish, the colors just seemed too good to be true.