14Apr Treasures from Tucson 2020 (part 1) - Golden Rutilated Quartz
In February 2020, we made our annual trip to the Tucson Gem Show to spend a couple of weeks with thousands of other gem and jewellery lovers, surrounded by every conceivable type of gemstone. The unfortunate thing for us is that so few of the stones we see have the level of traceability and transparency that we require for us to be able to buy them. However, there are a few exceptions to this, usually when we can deal with miners directly. One of these exceptions is Brian Cook from Nature's Geometry.
Brian has been working with mining communities in Brazil's Bahia state since 1983 and has been developing a specific sustainable mining project in Chapada Diamantina bringing golden rutilated quartz to the international market. He owns a quartz mine himself and works on a broader level with the mining community in Remedios, Novo Horizonte (photo above) to source and export the beautiful gem material.
The main aims of the project are to ensure that the miners have formal land and mining rights and adhere to safe mining practices, as well as working with the community to maximise the benefit to their local economy with value-added activities, such as gem cutting.
The golden rutilated quartz is a truly special gem material and we are very pleased to have acquired some selected pieces from Brian that we can now offer to our customers. You can find them on our website in the quartz section.
https://www.nineteen48.com/search/products?keywords=brazil
You can hear Brian talk about his decades of experience in Brazil in this excellent YouTube presentation from the Dallas Mineral Collecting Symposium 2019 - https://youtu.be/1dBXfq7XFvM