Serious collectors can become engrossed in displays of virtually any of the mineral themes or specializations discussed by Dunn and Francis (1990). However, curators realize that exhibits for public consumption must have a broad aesthetic appeal in addition to an educational element. Indeed, education is usually a secondary goal; the first objective is gaining and maintaining the attention of onlookers. Eliciting a “wow” factor in lay viewers is arguably easy to achieve on an intellectual level with large, spectacular specimens like gem crystals, but the impact factor of a display can be heightened when onlookers also have an emotional or visceral response. This occurs when audiences perceive a piece of themselves in exhibits – in other words, on a psychological level, people inherently like things that are familiar and to which they can relate (Wilson & McLaughlin, 2001).

Therefore, an especially enticing mineral display that potentially appeals to everyone on both intellectual and emotional levels is a “birthstone” suite. Birthstones have intrinsic and emotional value to most people. And a suite of birthstones is an example of a collection where “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” It is a natural grouping of objects that makes sense to lay viewers. Growing up in the “Land of Lincoln” (Central Illinois), I remember vividly the rough-and-cut birthstone display at the Illinois State Museum in Springfield. To me, it was the best exhibit in the geology hall. It was a display that always seemed to stop visitors in their tracks and encourage them to talk about minerals.

Classic writings like George F. Kunz’s The Curious Lore of Precious Stones (1913/1971) and Peter Bancroft’s Gem and Crystal Treasures (1984) show that gemstones have possessed religious, political and economic symbolism throughout history. This practice remains engrained in modern culture. Jewelry stores are frequently organized by birthstones, and general gem exhibits are among the most popular attractions at museums. “Rough and cut” gemstone collections and displays are also quite popular; knowledgeable mineral collectors need only remember Larson’s provocative exhibit at the 1999 Tuscon Gem and Mineral Show (Jones, 2004, p.148). Contemporary books about birthstones also abound, fueled in part by the “crystal power” and New Age movements of the 1980s. Google the terms “birthstones” (1,500,000 hits) and “birthstone jewelry” (1,510,000 hits), and you see about three million collective entries. Therefore, it is curious to contrast this vast historical and public interest in gem symbolism and birthstones with the apparently low number of academic or artistic exhibits devoted to the topic. For instance, Google the phrase “museum displays of birthstones” and you receive only about 105,000 hits. Moreover, some of the best funded and popular museums in the world currently do not seem to have birthstone displays. This state of affairs may well have confused or even frustrated Kunz!

That said, the Grainger Hall of Gems in Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History does have a small but nice display of gemstones that have been used as symbols throughout history, and Bill Larson and Gene Meiran presented an excellent exhibit at the 2005 Tucson Gem and Mineral Show that included birthstones, as did the 53rd Annual SGMS Show.

It is easy to understand why early cultures and the modern public have been enthralled by these natural wonders, individually as specimens but also as a group of symbols. We collectors are equally drawn to the same elements as lay viewers, which is the tremendous symbolism inherent in beautiful minerals. Today, we call some of these symbols by more scientific names like symmetry, color, luster and crystal form. But, shapes speak to us, colors speak to us, textures speak to us and balance and associations speak to us. Attributes like these appeal to both the intellectual and creative sides of our brains. The result is a primal reaction – we perceive meaning in what are essentially humble bits of chemical elements and compounds. Ultimately, that psychological sense of meaning is the source of all beauty… and especially the beauty and importance we ascribe to minerals and our birthstones.

I could go on for hours about the history and psychology behind birthstones, but I wanted to keep this article "light." To that end, below is some fun trivia associated with representative birthstones. Perhaps faithful Mindat members could find photos to match the materials to which I refer!


January: GARNET

The garnet group is known for an immense of colors. In fact, for the past 50 years the saying was “garnet comes in every color but blue.” However, that truism was recently rewritten to include a new “blue” variety that was discovered in the late 1990s in Bekily, Madagascar. The material has a color change of blue-green to purple and is a member of the pyrope-spessartine solid-solution series, with smaller constituents of almandine and grossular (Schmetzer & Bernhardt, 1999).

February: AMETHYST

Purple has long been considered a royal color so it is not surprising that amethyst has been so much in demand during history. Fine amethysts are featured in the British Crown Jewels and were also a favorite of Catherine the Great and Egyptian royalty. Because amethyst was thought to encourage celibacy and symbolize piety, amethyst was very important in the ornamentation of Catholic and other churches in the Middle Ages. It was, in particular, considered to be the stone of bishops and they still often wear amethyst rings. In Tibet, amethyst is considered to be sacred to Buddha and rosaries are often fashioned from it.

March: AQUAMARINE

Ancient sailors traveled with aquamarine crystals, believing that it would ensure a safe passage. This seems to be a dubious precaution, but we do know for certain that aquamarine was associated with at least one lucky ship. In 1891, Russian jeweler Peter Carl Fabergé presented one of his renowned Fabergé Easter eggs to Czar Alexander III. It was known as the Azova Egg, carved from a solid piece of green jasper and covered with gold and diamond scrollwork in Louis XV style. A tiny replica of the ship Pamiat Azova, made in gold was inside – set on a piece of aquamarine.

April: DIAMOND

Astronomers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics have found a diamond in space, and it's big… really big (Metcalfe, Montgomery & Kanaan, 2004). The object, technically known as BPM 37093, is a crystallized white dwarf star approximately 4,000 km across. The astronomers call it a diamond, because it's made up of crystallized carbon surrounded by a thin layer of hydrogen and helium gasses. The newly discovered cosmic diamond is a chunk of crystallized carbon 50 light-years from the Earth in the constellation Centaurus. (A light-year is the distance light travels in a year, or about 6 trillion miles.) It is 2,500 miles across and weighs 5 million trillion trillion pounds, which translates to approximately 10 billion trillion trillion carats, or a one followed by 34 zeros. Astronomers have decided to call the star "Lucy" after the Beatles song, “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” It is believed that this is the final outcome for many stars, including our own Sun. In five billion years our Sun will become a white dwarf and two billion years after that the carbon should crystallize to form a gigantic diamond.

May: EMERALD

Emerald, derived from the word smaragdus, meaning green in Greek, was mined in Egypt as early as 330 B.C. It is one of the most versatile gems, forming trapiches, cat’s-eyes and even showing asterism. There is even banded emerald-goshenite from Torrington, Australia. Visit http://www.gemsociety.org/emerald%20buddha.htm for a list of some of the most famous, impressive and best-documented emerald crystals and gems.

June: ALEXANDRITE

According to a widely popular but controversial story, alexandrite was discovered by the Finnish mineralogist Nils Gustaf Nordenskiöld, (1792 -1866) on the tsarevitch Alexanders sixteenth birthday on April 17, 1834 and named alexandrite in honor of the future Tsar Alexander II of Russia. Some might say it is synchronicity that alexandrite also mirrored the red and green colors of the Imperial Russian Flag.

July: RUBY

The Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History was recently gifted one of the world's largest and finest ruby gems. The spectacular 23.10-carat Burmese ruby – christened the Carmen Lúcia Ruby – is set in a platinum ring with diamonds. It was donated by businessman and philanthropist Peter Buck in memory of his wife Carmen Lúcia. The Carmen Lúcia Ruby will be on view indefinitely in the museum's National Gem Collection, part of the Janet Annenberg Hooker Hall of Geology, Gems and Minerals. The stone was mined from the fabled Mogok region of Burma in the 1930s. While sapphire, emerald and diamond gems weighing hundreds of carats exist, high quality Burmese rubies larger than 20 carats are exceedingly rare.

August: PERIDOT

Peridot was originally found on the remote St. John’s Island, Egypt. It is also found related to another “remote” location – iron nickel meteorites (cf. Sinkankas, Koivula & Becker, 1992). Some of the crystals from these Esquel pallasites are large enough to facet, although cut stones are extremely rare. The largest and clearest cut peridot from space is only 1.50-carats (trilliant cut) (Haag website: http://www.meteoriteman.com/collection/peridot.htm). A less staggering piece of trivia is that peridot is the author’s own birthstone.

September: SAPPHIRE

Blue is the sapphire color probably most in demand, but the rarest color in sapphire is a saturated pinkish-orange called padparascha, which means “lotus flower” in Sinhalese. It is an elusive shade in that its precise color parameters are hotly debated in the gem industry. However, many experts assert that one instinctively knows a true padparascha upon sight since the color arouses emotions, rather than merely intellect.

October: OPAL, PINK TOURMALINE

Interestingly, opal and tourmaline are minerals fundamentally linked with the notion of multi-colored. The word opal is derived from the Sanskrit word Upala meaning precious stone and later the Greek derivative Opallios, meaning to see a change of color. Opal is a gemstone that ranges in tone from semi-transparent to opaque. Its color covers a broad spectrum, but is mostly prized for what is known as a "play of color," or the ability to reflect and refract light into flashes of multiple colors. Tourmaline's name comes from the Sinhalese word turmali, which means mixed. Bright rainbow collections of gemstone varieties were called turmali parcels. Tourmaline, occurring in more colors and combinations of colors than any other gemstone variety, lives up to its name.

November: TOPAZ

Two of the largest topaz crystals known reside in the Smithsonian Institution. Before being donated, they had been slated to be cut for use in optical equipment (Post, 1997). It seems that some topaz does have the potential power to focus energies after all – at least in the physical, and not metaphysical, sense.

December: TURQUOISE

Typical turquoise forms are vein or fracture filling, nodular or botryoidal habits. Crystals, even at the microscopic scale, are exceedingly rare. While still difficult to acquire, they are not as rare as previously thought. In 1964, in his cornerstone work Mineralogy, John Sinkankas (pp. 425-426) wrote that turquoise crystals are "extremely rare," and "Acute pyramidal micro crystals occur only at the Virginia locality." In 1981 Richard Braithwaite increased the list to a total of six localities, and in 1995 Weiner and Hochleitner published a list of about seven localities. Since then, the number of known crystal- producing localities has increased to twenty-six (Jokela, Jr., 1998). One particularly interesting point raised by Jokela, Jr. (1998) that is worthy of further research would be why massive gem turquoise and turquoise crystals seem to be mutually exclusive, apparently never, or rarely, occurring in the same deposit.


REFERENCES

BANCROFT, P. (1984). Gem and Crystal Treasures. Western Enterprises/Mineralogical Record: Fallbrook, CA.

DUNN, P. J., and FRANCIS, C. A. (1990). Specialization in mineral collecting. Mineralogical Record, 21, 511-513.

JOKELA, JR., T. (1998). Turquoise crystal localities. The Eclectic Lapidary, II(7). http://www.bovagems.com/eclectic/HTML/19980701_9807JOKELA.html. Accessed June 21, 2007.

JONES, B. (2004). 50-Year History of the Tucson Show: Special Supplement to the Mineralogical Record. Tucson, AZ: The Mineralogical Record.

METCALFE, T. S., MONTGOMERY, M. H., and KANAAN, A. (2004). Testing white dwarf crystallization theory with asteroseismology of the massive pulsating DA Star BPM 37093. The Astrophysical Journal, 605, L133-L136.

POST, J. E. (1997). The National Gem Collection. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc.

SCHMETZER, K., and BERNHARDT, H. J. (1999). Garnets from Madagascar with a color change of blue-green to purple. Gems & Gemology, 35, 196-201.

SINKANKAS, J., KOIVULA, J. I., and BECKER, G. (1992). Peridot as an interplanetary gemstone. Gems & Gemology, 28, 43-51.

WILSON, G. D., and MCLAUGHLIN, C. (2001). The Science of Love. London: Fusion Press

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