Your birthstone was chosen by a room of American retail jewellers, voting at their annual convention in Kansas City in August 1912. The list has been amended three times since. The trade press covered the meeting that week, and we have read the report.
There is a standard account of where birthstones come from and it runs in one direction: twelve stones in a breastplate described in Exodus, then Josephus, then the zodiac, then an unbroken descent to the ring in the shop window. The line is real as far as it goes. Something did survive from the ancient world, and the habit of pairing stones with divisions of the year is genuinely old.
What the line leaves out is that the specific document your jeweller works from has an author, a date and a purpose, and none of the three is ancient. It was voted on by a trade body, for a stated commercial reason, and it has been edited three times since, by trade bodies including the one that adopted it. All of that is on the public record, printed at the time, and it takes an afternoon to read.
We think a site that repeats “since ancient times” while those documents sit in an open archive has not done the work. What the documents say is this.
What happened in Kansas City
The body was the American National Retail Jewelers’ Association, which its own successor, Jewelers of America, names as the organisation it grew out of. The occasion was its seventh annual convention, held at Kansas City, Missouri, from 6 to 9 August 1912. The Jewelers’ Circular and the Horological Review covered it in the issue of 14 August, and its summary of the week places the birthstone vote among the other business without any ceremony at all. The delegates, it reports, “adopted a standard list of birth-month stones for the jewelry trade,” in a sentence that also covers a proposed advertising law and a resolution on minimum profit margins.
Further down, the floor report is plainer still. “The amended birthstone list was next adopted,” it says, and then prints the list itself in two columns, headed Accepted Stones and Additions.
That is the founding document of the modern birthstone calendar. A motion, carried, between two other motions.
The convention was not coy about why. An address to the delegates by John Abel, titled “The History of Birth Stones,” set out the commercial case in figures: “There are about 80,000 jewelers in the United States, its possessions and Canada. If only an average per jeweler of $500 a year additional business is created, it means $15,000,000 added annually to your receipts.”
The multiplication does not work. Eighty thousand jewellers at $500 each is forty million dollars, not fifteen. Abel’s other sums are sound, since he checks the $500 himself as “only a weekly average of $9,” so the error is his and not a printer’s.
The rest of the address matters as much as the figure. Abel does reach for antiquity, at length: Pliny the Elder, the origin of the sentiments in “the mysterious far East,” and the breastplate of about eight inches square that Aaron carried set with twelve different gems, which Abel offers as “no doubt” the beginning of the belief in the power of gems. Then he says what he wants done with it. “My idea is that this ancient sentimentalism may be tempered with the modern commercialism, if the public at large is made more familiar through judicious advertising, about the good luck attending the wearing of proper birth gems.” The two halves of the modern birthstone list, its ancient credentials and its sales case, arrive in one sentence from the man making the case, with advertising named as the thing that joins them.
The second column has a commercial origin too, and a more specific one. Five months carry a second stone because the association’s president, Steele F. Roberts, judged that five of the primary stones were, in the report’s wording, “not always acceptable to the opposite sex,” and proposed substitutes for them. That is the origin the report gives for the alternate column. It is why March carries two stones on the 1912 sheet, along with June, August, October and December.
The list they voted for, and the list you were given
Six of the twelve lines read differently now.
| Month | Adopted in 1912 | On the American Gem Society’s current chart |
|---|---|---|
| January | Garnet | Garnet |
| February | Amethyst | Amethyst |
| March | Bloodstone, aquamarine as an addition | Aquamarine, bloodstone |
| April | Diamond | Diamond |
| May | Emerald | Emerald |
| June | Pearl, moonstone as an addition | Pearl, alexandrite, moonstone |
| July | Ruby | Ruby |
| August | Sardonyx, peridot as an addition | Peridot, sardonyx, spinel |
| September | Sapphire | Sapphire |
| October | Opal, tourmaline as an addition | Opal, tourmaline |
| November | Topaz | Topaz, citrine |
| December | Turquoise, lapis lazuli as an addition | Tanzanite, turquoise, zircon |
Several of the assignments described as ancient were made or moved in that room. Ruby had been December’s stone and the convention moved it to July. Turquoise went the other way, from July to December. Peridot was lifted out of September, where George Frederick Kunz wrote a year later that it had always sat, and made August’s addition. Sapphire was moved into September, which Kunz also objected to, on the grounds that it belonged to April.
When a shop tells you ruby has been July’s stone since antiquity, the defensible version is that ruby has been July’s stone since one week in August 1912.
What the amendments cover, and what they do not
The revision of 1952 is the substantial one. It was sponsored by the Jewelry Industry Council and approved by the retail jewellers’ association, the National Association of Credit Jewelers and the American Gem Society, and Jewelers’ Circular-Keystone printed it in August 1952. The council gave a frankly commercial reason for the changes, the same kind of reason 1912 had given, and it named the scope of what it was changing: two months, June and December. June gained alexandrite. December kept turquoise, lost lapis lazuli and gained zircon. Our June article quotes the council’s sentence in full.
Two later additions are documented and both are recent. Tanzanite was added to December in 2002, credited to the American Gem Trade Association with the International Colored Stone Association and Jewelers of America. Spinel was added to August in June 2016, announced jointly by Jewelers of America and the American Gem Trade Association.
Set those documents against the table and they cover less of it than they look as though they should. Alexandrite into June, lapis out of December and zircon into it, tanzanite into December, spinel into August: four changes, each with a document behind it that set out to make it.
The rest happened without one. The 1952 printing drops the two-column layout and gives every month a flat line, and in that reshuffle three of the 1912 alternates come out ahead of, or level with, the stone they had been standing behind. March reads aquamarine before bloodstone. August reads peridot before sardonyx. October’s tourmaline arrives at equal billing with opal. All three are visible on the page, none is inside the scope the 1952 report states for itself, and the report says nothing about any of them. What a modern chart does with the order after that is a weaker signal, since the American Gem Society now runs December alphabetically, but a second-column stone overtaking a first-column one in the trade’s own revised list is a change of substance.
November’s citrine is further out again, because it appears in no printing at all. It is on every current chart, absent from 1912 and absent from 1952, and no list-keeper gives it a date. Our November article works through that gap in detail.
Part of the reason is that no one has ever been appointed to keep the thing. The 1912 vote bound one trade association to a list for its members’ use. The 1952 revision was sponsored by an industry council and approved by three other bodies. The two most recent additions were announced by two or three organisations acting together. At no point did the calendar become the responsibility of a single named keeper with an obligation to publish what changed and when, which is why the chart in front of you can differ from the last document that authorised it while no one in particular is at fault.
Four changes have a document that claims them. Three more are visible in the 1952 printing and claimed by nothing. One is on the chart with no printing behind it at all. That is drift, not a scandal, and it is what happens to an unowned document. What makes it matter is that the same industry which let the drift happen also sells the list as heritage.
It was argued about at the time
The version in which 1912 quietly settles the question is wrong in the other direction too. The list was attacked within days.
The New York Times ran an editorial under the headline “Jewelers Make a Mistake.” We have not seen that editorial, only the reply to it printed in the trade press of 21 August by the gem dealer and author W. R. Cattelle, who opens by quoting the headline back at the paper. The reply is more damaging to the antiquity claim than the attack can have been, because Cattelle defends the new list by conceding the old ones:
“There is no one universal ancient list of birthstones. The ancients did not know enough about each other and stones to make one… It is a growing knowledge of these ancient errors and differences which has operated against the birthstone business of late and has become an incentive to the jeweler to establish a definite list on a rational basis to supersede the conflicting old ones.”
That is the case for the defence. There was no coherent ancient tradition, the public was starting to notice, and it was hurting sales.
Note who was making that argument. Cattelle was not a critic of the trade; he was defending the convention’s decision in public, and the defence he reached for was that the older lists conflicted and the jeweller was right to replace them with something orderly. He still claims continuity. Birthstones, he writes, are “an evolution of superstitions which was gradually formulated in various countries,” and he asks why it is worse for a modern jeweller to fit the ancient list to modern requirements than it was for an ancient one to do the same. The defence of 1912 is that adapting the list is what people have always done to it.
Kunz, the most respected gem authority of the period, refused the list outright. His verdict on the rearrangement was one flat sentence: “This suggested radical change or violation cannot be permitted.” It was permitted. He lost, and the list he objected to is the one in the shop.
His objection was not aesthetic. It was about what the list was for: “Once we allow the spirit of commercialism pure and simple to dictate the choice of such stones, according to the momentary interest of dealers, there is grave danger that the only true incentive to acquire birth-stones will be weakened and people will lose interest in them.” He thought a calendar known to be edited for trade reasons would stop meaning anything to the people buying from it. A century on, that is the argument made from the other side of the outcome.
Two of his specific complaints have aged well. Kunz held that “there should be no duplication or triplication of birth-stones for any given month,” which in 1912 was an objection to five months carrying two names; the current chart gives three months three stones each. And on the ruby and turquoise swap, favoured on the ground that a warm-coloured gem suited high summer and a pale one suited winter, he pointed out that the reasoning inverts: it is in winter that people seek warmth, and in the heat of summer that nothing is more grateful than coolness.
What “ancient” is doing in a shop
None of this makes the list illegitimate, and the easy conclusion is the wrong one. A tradition that begins in a committee is still a tradition a century later. People have worn these stones, given them and inherited them for more than a hundred years, and the minutes do not undo any of that.
The problem is narrower and it is commercial. The word ancient does work in a shop that the word 1912 does not. A stone with three thousand years behind it carries a different price and a different kind of loyalty than a stone assigned to a month by a trade body within living memory, and the writing around birthstones knows it. That is why the breastplate turns up in the opening paragraph of a birthstone page far more readily than the convention does.
It is also why the newer additions get the older framing. Tanzanite was not identified until the 1960s and has been December’s since 2002. Spinel joined August in 2016. Both get introduced in the same vocabulary of antiquity as garnet, which was January’s in 1912 and is January’s now.
We take the same line on treatments elsewhere on the site, and it is the same argument wearing a different coat. The objection to selling heat-treated citrine without saying so is not that treatment is wrong. It is that the buyer is being left to believe something about the stone that the seller already knows is not the case. Dating an assignment is the historical form of the same disclosure. It costs the seller a sentence and it costs the buyer nothing.
We do not think the answer is to stop selling birthstones or to tell people their stone means nothing. The answer is to date the claim.
The standard we hold
Here is the bar, and it applies across the site rather than only to this corner of it. Where we call a stone’s association traditional, we will tell you which century and who decided. Where we cannot, we will write that we cannot rather than reaching for the word.
Applied to this list, that means naming the document each time. An assignment made in that Kansas City room is a 1912 assignment. One made by the Jewelry Industry Council is a 1952 assignment. Tanzanite is 2002 and spinel is 2016. Citrine, March’s order, August’s order and October’s promotion have no document we can point to, and we say so in those words.
The second half of the standard is the one the industry skips. A site that invokes 1912 as its authority owes you the amendments as well as the date. Naming the founding vote while passing over 1952, 2002 and 2016 is how a commercial decision becomes heritage: the year sounds like provenance, and the revisions are the part that shows what the document really is. If it is good enough to cite as a standard, it is good enough to cite as the amended standard it has always been.
For a reader standing at a counter the standard reduces to one question, and it is not an aggressive one. Ask when the stone became that month’s. A seller who knows will tell you, and a seller who does not will generally say as much, which is a useful answer in itself. Neither reply should decide whether you buy the ring.
We applied that to ourselves before publishing it. We went back through our own twelve month-by-month pages and checked each one against the 1912 and 1952 printings. Six of them said something those printings do not support, and all six have been rewritten. That is an uncomfortable paragraph to put on a page. Leaving the errors up would have been worse, and it would have made everything above this line an argument we were not willing to lose.
The practical answer to the question in the title, then, is a room in Kansas City, three amendments since, and a fair amount of drift in between. Use the current list, because it is the one every retailer works from and there is no rival authority to prefer. Ask for the date whenever someone tells you an assignment is old. Our month-by-month guides now carry that date wherever one exists, and the stones themselves, as minerals rather than as calendar entries, are set out in the Crystalance Mineral Library.
Sources
- The Jewelers’ Circular and the Horological Review, vol. 65 no. 2, 14 August 1912, report of the seventh annual convention of the American National Retail Jewelers’ Association at Kansas City, with the adopted list printed in full: archive.org
- The Jewelers’ Circular, vol. 65 no. 3, 21 August 1912, W. R. Cattelle’s reply to The New York Times: archive.org
- Jewelers’ Circular-Keystone, vol. 120 no. 11, August 1952, p. 219, “Changed Birthstone List Receives OK From Trade”: archive.org
- Kunz, George Frederick, The Curious Lore of Precious Stones (1913), chapter IX, pp. 317 to 321: gutenberg.org
- Gems & Gemology, Winter 2002, gemological abstracts, abstracting R. Weldon, “Birth of a birthstone,” Professional Jeweler vol. 5 no. 12, 2002, p. 33, for the tanzanite addition and the bodies behind it: gia.edu
- National Jeweler, “JA, AGTA Add Spinel as August Birthstone,” 2 June 2016: nationaljeweler.com
- American Gem Society, birthstones by month, the current chart used in the table above: americangemsociety.org
- Jewelers of America, birthstones by month, for the organisation’s account of the list’s 1912 origin and its own descent from the 1912 association: jewelers.org
