Pala Pink Tourmaline: The California Story | Elyzian

Pala Pink: A California Tourmaline Story

July 07, 2026By Elizabeth

Butterfly brooch with pink tourmaline cabochon wings, a green tourmaline body, and a pear-cut rubellite center framed in diamonds, in yellow gold.

Raw pink tourmaline crystal from Pala held to the light, glowing neon magenta

Provenance · Pala, California

The most storied pink in fine jewelry came out of a hillside in San Diego County. This is its history — and the magenta crystal I have never let go of.

I still have the first tourmaline I ever held. I was a child, and I found it myself, in the dirt outside a mine in the hills of San Diego County: a flat blade of crystal the color of neon bubblegum, a magenta so saturated it looked lit from within. Hold it up to the sky and the sun pours straight through. I have never had it cut, never had it set, never asked it to be anything other than what it already is. It sits today exactly as it came out of the ground, and it is the reason I read color the way I do.

That hillside has a name that means something to anyone who loves gemstones. Pala.

Left to right: Valaree and Elizabeth Wahler at the Pala mines, San Diego, California, 1992.

The pink that crossed an ocean

Pala sits in the gem-bearing foothills of northern San Diego County, and for a stretch of the early twentieth century it was one of the most important sources of pink tourmaline on earth. Tourmaline had been turning up in the district since the late 1800s, but the boom arrived between roughly 1900 and 1922, and it arrived because of a single, far-away patron.

The Empress Dowager Cixi, who ruled China through the close of the Qing dynasty, was devoted to pink tourmaline. The stone was carved into snuff bottles and toggles, worn at court, and prized through the highest circles of the imperial household. To feed that appetite, San Diego's mines shipped their finest pink rough across the Pacific, with Tiffany & Co. acting as the broker between a California mountainside and the Chinese court. By the accounting of the San Diego Natural History Museum, the county sent more than 120 tons of gem-quality pink tourmaline to China between 1902 and 1910. When the Empress died in 1911, the market she had built went with her, and the great Pala boom quieted.

The mines themselves remain. The Pala Chief, where deposits were opened around 1903, gave up enormous quantities of tourmaline destined for the carving trade. It was also the place where gem-quality kunzite was first found — the soft lilac spodumene named for Tiffany's own gemologist, George Frederick Kunz, with much of the early material going to Tiffany to be cut. A single hillside, in other words, supplied the pink the world wanted and introduced a gemstone the world had never seen.

The man who kept it alive

By the late 1960s the district had gone quiet for decades. Then, in 1968, a young dealer named Bill Larson formed Pala Properties International — now Pala International — and took on three of the historic mines: the Stewart Lithia, the Tourmaline Queen, and the Pala Chief. A geological engineer by training, out of the Colorado School of Mines, Larson treated the old workings as both a business and a calling, and he reopened a chapter most people assumed was closed.

The faith paid off in January 1972, when a strike at the Tourmaline Queen opened what Larson described as the pocket of the century: rubellite crystals of extraordinary color, some capped in blue, several still wearing collars of peach morganite. One specimen from that find, the Candelabra, now stands in the Smithsonian. The discovery put California tourmaline back on the world stage and put Pala International at the center of it.

Larson went on to build one of the finest private mineral collections in existence and helped found the trade bodies that still govern colored stones today. Six decades in, he is among the most knowledgeable gem men alive, and his family carries the work forward. When I think about why American tourmaline still carries weight in the gem world, I think about him.

The day I found mine

My family were collectors, so a mine was a kind of natural habitat for us. I was eleven, maybe twelve, on a private mining trip with my mother and a small group. We toured the workings first — inside the mountain, hands flat against the walls, the ore carts still sitting in their tracks, someone walking us through how the whole operation ran in the early days. Then the collection: Bill Larson's own minerals, room after room, more color and form than I knew the earth could make. I was a child, and I was in total wonder.

I remember exactly what I was wearing. Watercolor-washed denim in the softest yellow and pink, the colors bleeding into one another the way watercolor does on paper, and a chambray shirt with mother-of-pearl buttons. My father kept a photograph of me from that day on his desk for most of my adult life.

After the tour, Bill said something I have never forgotten. Elizabeth, whatever you find outside the mine is yours to keep. I was eleven and dressed for exactly this. I sat straight down in the dirt, in those good clothes, and started cracking open clods of matrix one after another. Small pretty pieces came loose, nothing I can name now. Then I got hold of one big clod and broke it open feverishly, and inside was the magenta: a flat, double-terminated crystal, oval at the sides and flat across both ends, about the size of four pieces of bubble gum laid together. I held it up and the sun came clean through it. The most spectacular pink I had ever seen. The most perfect crystal.

Bill was standing right beside me when I found it. I was eleven, so take this as a child's reading of a grown man's face — I am fairly sure he knew exactly what he had just let me keep. I watched him look at the stone, then at my mother. The two of them held each other's eyes, then looked at the crystal, then looked at me. A great deal of looking and not a single word. And then he made good on what he had promised a child, and let me walk off with something he might easily have kept for himself. I have understood it ever since as a real act of kindness.

The Pala pink tourmaline crystal held to the sun, glowing magenta

“Of all the gemstones I've seen, none has been more memorable than the vivid pink tourmaline my 11-year-old daughter uncovered with her own hands. It taught her that every great treasure begins with patience, hope, and a little dirt.”Valaree Wahler

I already loved color by then. That afternoon was when it became the thing I would spend my life on.

The stone lives somewhere safe now. For years I never once photographed it — I kept meaning to and never did. When I take it out and hold it to the light, I am eleven again, and I fall for that color all over. It is the same feeling I get every time we get our hands on old material out of the Pala ground. Which, now and then, we do.

Left to right: Elizabeth and Valaree Wahler, 1992.

A great deal of looking, and not a single word.

Why tourmaline

Tourmaline is the most generous of the colored stones. It occurs across a wider range of color than any other gem — from that electric Pala pink through deep rubellite red, cool indicolite blue, and greens that read like new leaves — and a single crystal can hold two or three of those colors at once. That range is the whole pleasure of it, and it is why tourmaline runs through so much of what we make at Elyzian.

A note on wearing it: pink tourmaline is one of the few saturated stones that flatters nearly every skin tone, and it lives easily against warm yellow gold. I wear a rubellite piece the way I would wear a red lip — as the one decisive note in an otherwise quiet look. Stack a single tourmaline ring with plain gold bands and let the color carry the whole hand.

The tourmaline we have now

From Pala itself

A few things tie back to that exact ground — the same source that gave me my crystal. Our Pink Tourmaline Cabochon Ring in 18K Gold is cut from Pala, California tourmaline: a domed, saturated pink cabochon, the band scattered with yellow sapphires. The warm yellow against that pink is the whole reason it exists. — $3,500

A showpiece butterfly is coming soon, and every stone in it was mined at the Tourmaline Queen — the same Pala claim that gave up Bill Larson's pocket of the century. The tourmaline took the long way here: Larson sold it in Hong Kong to the father of the goldsmith who sets our jewelry today, and it has passed from his hands to hers to become this. Four pink tourmaline cabochons form the wings, a green tourmaline cabochon sits at the body, and a pear-cut rubellite ringed in diamonds anchors the center, with diamond pavé tracing the antennae. It wears two ways, sliding onto an Omega chain or pinning on as a brooch. Worth watching for.

We also keep a small reserve of significant rough still waiting to be set. If you would like something made from it, our custom atelier is where that conversation begins.

Pink and rubellite

These echo that Pala pink, in stones sourced across the world.

Hand-carved and one of a kind

Hand-Carved Pink Tourmaline and Diamond Plum Blossom Clip-On Stud Earrings in 18K Gold$13,600

The full spectrum, beyond pink

Every one of these began as rough pulled from the ground, somewhere, by someone who believed the color was worth the labor. That is the part of tourmaline I think about most. I have held that belief in my hand since I was a little girl.

— Elizabeth