Rainbow tourmaline is the trade name given to tourmaline crystals showing more than three colours, or an especially vivid, multi-hued combination of pink, green, yellow, and blue within a single specimen.
The same trace element chemistry responsible for bi-colour and tri-colour banding is behind rainbow tourmaline, just with more frequent shifts in the crystal's growing environment. The result is a crystal that can show a genuinely striking range of colour in cross section.
This variety is not associated with any single mine, but Afghanistan's tourmaline bearing pegmatites are among the more consistent sources of well coloured rainbow material reaching the market today.
Because the colour zoning is the whole appeal, rainbow tourmaline is collected almost entirely as natural crystal specimens rather than cut gemstones.
Browse our Rainbow Tourmaline collection.