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Ethiopia confirmed as a source of copper-bearing tourmaline

News · · Maedot

Ethiopia is now a recognised source of copper-bearing tourmaline, the material traded as paraíba tourmaline. On 27 August 2026 GIA and the Gübelin Gem Lab announced that each, working separately, had concluded that tourmaline from a new Ethiopian deposit meets the accepted definition of paraíba. GIA said it can now state Ethiopia as the origin on its tourmaline identification and origin reports. Before this, the established sources were Brazil, Nigeria and Mozambique.

Where it was found

The laboratories' announcement does not name the locality. Field reports do. Writing in the Italian Gemological Review, Haimanot Sisay describes the site, about 2 km east of Abuloo village in Oromia, roughly 50 km north-east of Shakiso. He visited it on 26 June 2026; the tourmaline lies in soil down to about 6 m. He was told the first stones were found during prospecting for gold.

How the laboratories got there

  • May 2026. Gübelin saw paraíba tourmalines whose chemistry matched none of its reference data for Brazil, Mozambique or Nigeria. Over the following weeks it gathered about 300 rough and cut stones, including samples collected in Ethiopia by one of its gemmologists.
  • June 2026. SSEF reported trade accounts of a new deposit and said its first trace-element results overlapped considerably with Brazilian stones, so origin could be hard to call. GIA began examining parcels presented as Ethiopian.
  • July 2026. The dealer Ferreira Group sent GIA more than 100 rough and cut samples.
  • 27 August 2026. GIA and Gübelin announced matching conclusions. Both will publish full papers in Gems & Gemology.

How a laboratory places the origin

Standard gemmological tests cannot tell where a paraíba tourmaline came from, and colours from different countries overlap. GIA uses quantitative trace-element analysis by LA-ICP-MS, comparing copper, zinc, gallium, strontium, tin and lead with its reference samples. In the Ethiopian material both laboratories found raised vanadium (above 60 ppm), lead (170 to 6,000 ppm) and gallium (280 to 900 ppm). Gübelin says these can be measured on a good ED-XRF instrument, without research-grade equipment.

Origin affects price. GIA notes that Brazilian paraíba is usually valued above African material.

What "paraíba" means

Paraíba is a variety name, not a statement of origin. Under the definition shared by the laboratories of the Laboratory Manual Harmonisation Committee (LMHC), which include GIA, Gübelin and SSEF, a paraíba tourmaline is blue, bluish green to greenish blue, green or yellowish green, of medium-light to high saturation and tone, coloured mainly by copper and manganese, from any locality. The name comes from Paraíba State in Brazil, where the stone was first mined in the late 1980s.

The definition has limits. Tourmaline with only traces of copper, weak colour or a colour outside that range is not called paraíba. Nor is iron-rich copper-bearing tourmaline whose absorption band at 700 nm is stronger than the copper band near 900 nm, a difference only a UV-Vis-NIR spectrometer shows. Sisay notes that no such instrument is available in Ethiopia.

In a preliminary study of 21 rough stones said to come from Abuloo, Vincent Pardieu and co-authors found many with moderate to high iron. Of the five largest, three were clearly coloured by copper and qualified as paraíba; other stones were iron-dominant indicolite or fell in between. Their conclusion was that not everything from Abuloo is paraíba, and that appearance cannot decide it. LMHC also notes that paraíba tourmaline is commonly heated, and that heating cannot always be detected.

If you are looking for it

We source copper-bearing tourmaline from Ethiopia on request. From any seller, ask for a laboratory report that states both the variety and the origin. LMHC laboratories treat origin as optional, and a report that follows their wording and leaves origin out says that it has not been determined.

Sources

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