December Birthstone: Meaning, Stones, and How to Choose

December owns the year's clearest skies and longest nights, and every one of its stones is blue in answer. Turquoise leads, the sky brought down to hand height, warm to the touch in a way no transparent gem manages and older in human company than writing. Sinai miners worked it for the pharaohs; Persian artisans tiled domes with its color; the peoples of the American Southwest made it the center of silverwork that defines a whole region's light. Beside it sit zircon, whose blue snaps with nearly diamond level fire, and tanzanite, a velvet violet blue the world had never seen until 1967, when it surfaced in the shadow of Kilimanjaro. In my practice, December clients get the happiest dilemma on the calendar: three true blues, three price ranges, three completely different ways of wearing winter. Few months are spoiled like this.

Every stone named on this page links to its full profile in the crystal encyclopedia, and if you want your whole birth date read at once, zodiac, birthstone, and life-path number together, the Crystal Birthday Pairing tool does exactly that.

The December Birthstone: Turquoise

Modern (1912 Jewelers of America list) and Traditional

Turquoise holds December as the oldest stone on the whole calendar, mined in Sinai and Persia thousands of years before anyone standardized anything. Its opaque sky blue is winter weather made wearable, and its company is entirely blue besides: zircon and tanzanite, December's official siblings, both come dressed in the month's cold palette. The year ends on the gem humanity started with.

All three December stones run blue, making it the calendar's most color coordinated month.

Read the full Turquoise profileShop Turquoise

Other December Stones Across the Traditions

Where the December Birthstone Comes From

December's roster spans the entire history of the tradition, from the oldest gem to the newest. Turquoise sits at the ancient end: Egyptian expeditions mined the Sinai deposits thousands of years ago, and the stone held December on the traditional tables and the 1912 Kansas City list, which originally paired it with lapis lazuli. The 1952 Jewelry Industry Council revision swapped lapis for blue zircon, a stone with deep credentials of its own in Asian jewelry. Then came the calendar's youngest member: tanzanite, the blue violet zoisite discovered in Tanzania's Merelani Hills in 1967, named by Tiffany and Company for its only homeland and added to December by the American Gem Trade Association in 2002. One month thus runs from the first gem humans loved to a gem younger than the moon landing, all of it wearing the same December blue.

How to Choose Your December Stone

Triage December by budget, durability, and shade. Turquoise is the heritage pick, porous and soft, so buy it in bezels and beads, keep perfume off it, and ask whether stones are stabilized, which is common and worth disclosing. Blue zircon offers the most sparkle per dollar but abrades at facet edges; store it kindly. Tanzanite is the splurge, a 6.5 on the Mohs scale single source stone best in pendants and earrings; its supply truly is finite. Blue topaz quietly covers the everyday ring duty the other three resent. Sagittarius birthdays through the twenty first and Capricorn birthdays after both wear any of them well.

Related Birthstones

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