June Birthstone

June Birthstone:
Pearl, Moonstone, Alexandrite.


Pearl:












Pearl is the official birthstone for the month of June as adopted by the American National Association of Jewelers in 1912. It is also the birthstone for the Sun Signs of Gemini and Cancer. See the birthstone tables for additional references to this stone.
The most valuable pearls are perfectly symmetrical, relatively large and naturally produced. They have a shimmering iridescence which is called orient luster.
From one of the humblest of life forms, the mollusk, comes the pearl, a gem of unsurpassed beauty and elegance. Ancient civilizations had many stories to explain the origin of June's birthstone, such as the Greek belief that pearls were the hardened tears of joy that the goddess of love shook from her eyes as she was born from the sea. According to Arab legend, pearls were formed when oysters were lured from the depths of the ocean by the beautiful moon and then swallowed moonlit dewdrops. And the Ancient Chinese thought that these gems originated from the brains of dragons.
Pearls have been a passion and even an obsession of people throughout the ages. They have been ground up and used in cosmetics and as a medicine to treat heart and stomach conditions.

Moonstone:
















Moonstone belongs to the large mineral family of feldspars. It is an opalescent stone which can range from colorless to blue, peach, green, pink, yellow, brown or gray with a silvery scheen.
Clarity ranges from transparent to translucent. Rainbow moonstone is milky white with a rainbow colored sheen. Moonstone is the most valuable form of feldspar and is composed of albite, which gives it the bluish scheen, and orthoclase feldspar.
Moonstone (also called rainbow moonstone) is soft milky white stone, the most valuable variety of feldspar with an rainbow sheen. Moonstone shows a silvery or bluish iridescence, that is caused by the intergrowth of two different types of feldspar with different efractive indexes. The term moonstone also has been applied to the plagioclase feldspars peristerite and labradorite, which also exhibit iridescence.


Alexandrite:















The alternate birthstone for June is the Alexandrite. A yellowish or brownish green in color, this gemstone has the unique characteristic of changing color to a red hue when exposed to a glowing light source, such as candlelight. Because of this quality, it has been characterized by poets as "an emerald by day, a ruby by night." Alexandrite was first discovered in Urals in 1830 but is mined today primarily in Sri Lanka, Zimbabwe, Brazil, Burma, Madagascar and Tanzania. It is a rare and expensive gemstone, symbolic of joy and good fortune.
Some historians claim that the first alexandrite was discovered on the coming of age of the Russian Tsar, Alexander II, on his sixteenth birthday on April 17, 1834. But earlier records show that a vein of "emeralds" was found at the same location in the Ural mountains several years earlier, in 1830 or 1831.