June has three birthstones: pearl, moonstone and alexandrite. Pearl and moonstone were both on the American list adopted in 1912. Alexandrite was added forty years later, in the revision of 1952.
A trade council announcing that revision explained itself in one sentence, printed in the jewellery press in August 1952. “The basic reason for changes in June and December,” it said, “arises from the fact that the old list did not provide a birthstone that appealed to men and boys for their own use for these months.”
That sentence gives away more than it means to. The birthstone list is not a record of what people have believed, but a document, maintained by an industry and edited when the industry notices a gap in who is buying. June is the best place on the calendar to watch that happen, because its three stones arrived by three different routes, and a fourth thing happened to the oldest of them without any vote being taken at all.
The one nobody had to argue about
Pearl was already there. When the American retail jewellers adopted their standard list in 1912, June’s line read pearl, with moonstone printed beside it as an addition, and no argument about pearl appears anywhere in the record of that decision.
None was needed. Pearls had been prized for several thousand years, for the ordinary reason that nobody could make them, and a demand that old does not require a committee to ratify it. Pearl is also the only entry on the twelve-month calendar produced by an animal instead of by geology, and nobody in 1912 saw a difficulty in that either.
A second reason pearl was safe has nothing to do with sentiment and everything to do with supply. A birthstone list is only useful to a jeweller if the jeweller can stock the stone, and by 1912 pearls could be stocked in quantity. Diamond and emerald held their own months on the same terms, and pearl belonged to that order of things: familiar to a customer, and expensive enough to be worth selling.
The first mechanism, then, is the least interesting and the most common. A stone gets onto the list because it was already on the lists that came before, and the new list copies it across.
What the second column was for
Moonstone arrived differently. On the 1912 sheet it sits in a separate column, and June was one of five months given a second name that year. The two columns were not doing the same job.
An alternate is an answer to a question about the buyer. Somebody born in June who did not want pearls walked out of a shop without buying anything, and a second name on the line let the shop ask again. Moonstone is a feldspar, cut as a smooth dome to show the drifting blue-white sheen called adularescence, and it has never cost anything like a good strand of pearls. Both of those facts help explain why it works in that column.
The arrangement also explains something readers often find odd about the birthstone calendar, which is why some months carry one name and others two or three. The months with several stones are not the months with richer traditions. They are the months where somebody decided the first answer was not going to be enough.
The second mechanism, then, is substitution. A stone gets onto the list because the stone already on the list is not selling to everybody.
A hundred and twenty-two years between the mine and the list
Alexandrite has a date at both ends. Abundant deposits of it were first found in 1830, in the Ural Mountains of Russia. GIA records that those first stones were of very fine quality with a dramatic colour change, green in daylight and red under a lamp, and that the gem was named after the young Alexander II, heir apparent to the throne. He was a boy at the time and did not become tsar until 1855, so the stone is named for a prince and not for an emperor, which is a small thing that gets rounded off in most retellings.
GIA adds the detail that explains why a newly found stone in a distant mountain range caught a whole country’s attention. Red and green were the national military colours of imperial Russia, and here was a gem that produced both, one after the other, depending on the light it was held in.
None of that put it on a birthstone list. What put it there was the 1952 revision, and the reason the council gave for the revision is the sentence at the top of this article. A stone found in 1830 entered the June line a hundred and twenty-two years later, because a trade body wanted something on that line to sell to men and boys.
The third mechanism is addition, and it is the one that leaves a paper trail. The spectacular Russian deposits did not last, and most alexandrite now comes from Sri Lanka, East Africa and Brazil. Fine material with a clean colour change remains genuinely rare, which is why the newest of June’s three stones is also the one most June babies will never own.
The change that never reached the list
Following experiments begun around 1890 at Ago Bay in Japan, Kokichi Mikimoto produced cultured pearls in 1893 and round cultured pearls in 1905. A bead is introduced into a living oyster, the oyster coats it with nacre over several years, and the result is a pearl in every sense that matters to a jeweller. When they reached the London market, some experienced pearl merchants took them for natural stones, a confusion recorded in the scientific press of 1921. GIA dates their commercial arrival to the 1920s and adds, inside a parenthesis, that this was “about the same time natural pearl production began to decline”. The two things happened together. GIA does not say the one caused the other, and elsewhere attributes the decline of the New World pearl sources to four things at once, overfishing, pearl culturing, plastic buttons and oil drilling.
A cultured pearl is not an imitation of a pearl. It is the same material the same animal would have laid down anyway, built up around a starting point a person supplied instead of the sea. Merchants who had handled natural pearls all their working lives could not tell the difference by eye, which is precisely why the new material was able to take the market rather than sit alongside it.
The effect on the word is not in doubt. When the 1912 convention wrote pearl on June’s line, a pearl was an object found by chance in a wild animal. A century later the same word on the same line means an object grown deliberately in a farmed one. Nobody voted on that. The list was not amended, because from the list’s point of view nothing had happened.
What a June birthday is choosing between
Pearl is organic, soft, and the only one of the three that will not survive careless treatment. Moonstone is the affordable one and the one most often reached for in modern crystal work, where its lunar associations do most of the talking. Alexandrite is a collector’s stone with a price to match, and GIA describes fine-colour material as extremely rare against a supply that is currently low. A month with three birthstones sounds like a generous month. June is more accurately a month where three separate events, spread across three centuries and unconnected to each other, each left something behind on the same line.
Anyone approaching June through the sign rather than the calendar meets a shorter list, since Gemini covers only the first three weeks and inherits pearl and moonstone without alexandrite.
Fine alexandrite is rare enough that most people will only ever see it in a photograph, and the jewellers who do stock it tend not to leave it in the window.
Whether June has finished happening is a fair question, and no is the answer. Alexandrite entered in living memory, and the meaning of the word pearl changed underneath the list without the list noticing. The minerals themselves have not moved at all in that time, and the Crystalance Mineral Library files two of the three under chrysoberyl and feldspar, where they have sat throughout. Neither the adding nor the redefining looks finished.
Sources
- The Jewelers’ Circular and the Horological Review, 14 August 1912, the adopted list with pearl and moonstone for June: archive.org
- Jewelers’ Circular-Keystone, August 1952, p. 219, “Changed Birthstone List Receives OK From Trade”: archive.org
- GIA, alexandrite history and lore, on the 1830 Ural discovery and the naming: gia.edu
- GIA, alexandrite quality factors, on supply and the rarity of fine-colour material: gia.edu
- GIA, historical reading list on Japanese cultured pearls, on Mikimoto and the 1921 London market: gia.edu
- GIA, pearl history and lore, on cultured pearls becoming commercially important in the 1920s: gia.edu
