White Tourmaline

White Tourmaline is a colorless to milky-white variety of elbaite, known gemologically as achroite (from the Greek for 'without color'). It contains very little of the trace elements that color other tourmalines, leaving it nearly pigment-free.

Genuinely colorless tourmaline is rare, since most pegmatite tourmalines pick up at least faint tints; truly clear achroite is uncommon and collectible. Milky-white material is more common and is often used in beads and cabochons.

Like all tourmaline it is hard and durable, and transparent stones can be faceted for understated, diamond-alternative jewelry.

White Tourmaline forms in granitic pegmatites, crystallizing as elbaite in gem pockets when the residual melt is unusually depleted in the iron, manganese, and other transition metals that color tourmaline. This chemical purity yields colorless or near-colorless crystals.

Milky-white appearance often results from abundant fine inclusions and fluid-filled tubes rather than from pigment.

Sources include Madagascar, Brazil, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the pegmatites of California and Maine in the United States.

Identify white tourmaline by its colorless to milky-white appearance, vitreous luster, white streak, and hardness of 7-7.5. Because it lacks strong color, pleochroism is weak or absent, but double refraction is still present and crystals show characteristic lengthwise striations and rounded triangular cross sections.

Look-alikes include colorless quartz (rock crystal, no striations of this kind, hardness 7), goshenite (colorless beryl, different optics), white topaz (perfect cleavage), and white sapphire (hardness 9). Tourmaline's striations, double refraction, and tube inclusions help separate it from these.

White Tourmaline is used in jewelry as an understated colorless gem and occasionally as a diamond or white-sapphire alternative when faceted clean. Milky material is fashioned into beads and cabochons.

Colorless achroite crystals are collected as mineral curiosities because of their rarity, and the variety completes color suites for tourmaline collectors.

Metaphysically, white tourmaline is associated with clarity and amplification of other stones; such uses are traditional rather than scientific.