The History of Opal & Tourmaline

The Ancient Origins of Opal

Opal has been dug out of the ground and worn as jewelry for a very long time. Archaeologists have found opal artifacts in a cave in Kenya dating back roughly 6,000 years, and by the height of the Roman Empire the stone was already considered a prize. The word "opal" most likely comes from the Sanskrit upala, meaning simply "precious stone," which tells you something about how highly it was regarded before it even had a name of its own.

Pliny the Elder wrote about opal in his Natural History, and for once he got specific. He describes a Roman senator named Nonius who owned an opal ring so prized that when the triumvir Mark Antony demanded it, Nonius chose exile instead, fleeing Rome rather than hand it over. Pliny valued the stone at 2,000,000 sesterces, an enormous sum, and described it as "as large as a hazel-nut." Kunz records the Nonius story in his 1913 study of gem lore and notes that Pliny's glowing description of the stone, "a softer fire than the carbuncle... the brilliant purple of the amethyst... the sea-green of the emerald, all shining together," fits opal so well that scholars still debate whether he was describing the exact gem we know today.

The Romans called it opalus and believed it combined the virtues of every gemstone whose color appeared in its play of light. That belief, that opal was a kind of gem of gems, gave it a reputation as the luckiest stone a person could own, a reputation that would later be turned completely upside down.

Opal's use as an amulet was not confined to Rome. Kunz notes that in the East, opal was widely worn specifically because it was believed to preserve its wearer from disease, a use that had nothing to do with its later, purely Western reputation for bad luck. Roman writers separately record that opal was considered too precious even to imitate convincingly. Pliny observed that Indian craftsmen who tried to reproduce the opalus in glass never quite managed it, calling opal, alongside pearl, one of the very few gems that resisted convincing forgery in the ancient world.

Tourmaline: A Gem Europe Discovered Late

Tourmaline's story starts centuries after opal's. Dutch traders brought gem-quality tourmaline out of Sri Lanka to Europe around 1700, and the name comes from the Sinhalese turamali, roughly "mixed colored stones," a fitting name for a mineral family that comes in nearly every hue on the color wheel. Dutch jewelers also discovered that heated tourmaline develops an electric charge strong enough to attract ash and lint, a property called pyroelectricity, and they nicknamed the stone aschentrekker, "ash puller," using it to clean the ash out of their pipes.

Because tourmaline only entered European awareness in the 1700s, gemologist George Frederick Kunz argued in his 1913 survey of birthstone lore that it did not belong on a birthstone list at all. He wrote that tourmaline "seems out of place in the list of birth-stones, which ought only to comprise precious or semi-precious stones which have been known and worn from ancient times," and pushed instead for beryl to represent October. His objection lost. Tourmaline's color range and durability were exactly what the modern jewelry trade wanted, and the stone kept climbing in popularity anyway.

The irony is that Kunz himself did more than almost anyone to make tourmaline popular in America. He first walked into Tiffany & Co. in 1875 as a 20-year-old carrying fine green tourmaline from the Mount Mica mine in Maine, a meeting that launched his long career as the firm's chief gemologist. Kunz spent decades afterward championing Maine and California tourmaline to American buyers, arguing that homegrown gems deserved the same respect as European stones, even while privately questioning tourmaline's credentials as a genuine birthstone in his own writing decades later. That contradiction, a skeptic who was also the gem's biggest promoter, says a lot about how quickly tourmaline moved from obscurity to must-have in the space of a single career.