silicates
Elbaite
Na(Al1.5Li1.5)Al6(Si6O18)(BO3)3(OH)3(OH)
- Also known as
- rubelliteindicoliteverdeliteParaiba tourmaline
- Crystal system
- trigonal
- Hardness
- 7–7.5 on the Mohs scale
- Lustre
- vitreous
- Colour
- Pink, green, blue, colourless, and combinations
- Where it forms
- In lithium-rich granite pegmatites, alongside spodumene, lepidolite and beryl.
- Chiefly from
- Elba, ItalyMinas Gerais, BrazilCalifornia, United StatesAfghanistan
Why it is that colour
Manganese for pink, iron for green and blue, copper for the Paraiba neon blues. Elbaite is the lithium-bearing tourmaline and it is the one nearly all gem tourmaline belongs to.
Safety
Safe to handle.
Where it comes from
Brazilian, Afghan and Californian pegmatites. The Himalaya Mine in California supplied enormous quantities of pink tourmaline to the Chinese imperial court in the early twentieth century, and the trade collapsed with the Qing dynasty in 1912.
Historical use
The Empress Dowager Cixi was so fond of Californian pink tourmaline that San Diego County mines were effectively working for a single customer. When the dynasty fell, so did the mines.
Recorded as history and attributed where possible. That a stone was used for something establishes that people used it, not that it worked.
What is attributed to it, and since when
Named in 1913 after the island of Elba. All of its attributions are modern.
Described, not endorsed. Dating a claim is not the same as assessing it — but an association that first appears in a book published in 1985 is not an ancient inheritance, whatever the label says. A sincere account of feeling better is compatible with the stone doing nothing — see the placebo effect.
Worth knowing
Almost every coloured tourmaline in a shop is elbaite, and almost none of them are labelled that way. The trade uses colour names — rubellite for pink and red, indicolite for blue, verdelite for green, Paraiba for the copper-bearing neon material — and those names describe the same species with different impurities in it, exactly as ruby and sapphire describe corundum.
The Cixi story is a nice piece of economic history. A Californian mining district in the 1900s was dependent on the taste of one elderly woman in Beijing, and it went under when she died and the dynasty followed.
Identity checked against IMA-CNMNC master list, June 2025.