March Birthstone: Meaning, Stones, and How to Choose

March is the year's hinge month, winter on the first and something hopeful by the thirty first, and it is the rare month that openly keeps two birthstones for its two moods. Aquamarine is the modern stone, beryl the color of meltwater, and holding one is the closest jewelry comes to the first above freezing afternoon. Bloodstone is the elder, a deep green chalcedony flecked red with iron oxide, the stone of soldiers and surgeons in the old lapidaries, kept for courage when the season still bites. I keep both on my workbench in March and watch which one visitors reach for; the choice tells me more about their week than their birthday. Many people find they want the aquamarine on hopeful days and the bloodstone on hard ones, and the month, generous for once, lets them have both without any argument from tradition.

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 March Birthstone: Aquamarine

Modern (1912 Jewelers of America list)

Aquamarine holds March on the modern list as the calendar's first stone of thaw. The gem is beryl tinted by iron into the exact blue of meltwater, and the 1912 standardization chose it for March just as the northern hemisphere's ice lets go. It shares the month's story with bloodstone, the older March stone it displaced, and most jewelers still honor both.

March is one of the few months where the traditional stone, bloodstone, remains in common use beside the modern pick.

Read the full Aquamarine profileShop Aquamarine

Other March Stones Across the Traditions

Where the March Birthstone Comes From

March is the clearest case study in how the modern birthstone list was actually made. For centuries the month belonged to bloodstone, the spotted green chalcedony the old lists sometimes called heliotrope, and before that the breastplate derived tables seated jasper in the March position. When the American National Association of Jewelers met in Kansas City in 1912 to standardize the commercial calendar, they admitted aquamarine for March, and the sea colored beryl gradually displaced bloodstone in shop windows across the century. Neither the 1952 Jewelry Industry Council revision nor the later 2002 and 2016 additions revisited the month, so the dual tradition simply settled in place: aquamarine modern, bloodstone traditional, both legitimate. Roman writers had already attached aquamarine to sailors and safe crossings, which gave the newcomer a pedigree old enough to stand beside the stone it replaced without embarrassment.

How to Choose Your March Stone

Choose by temperament, since March lets you. Aquamarine suits people who want their stone luminous and looking forward; it wears well at 7.5 to 8 on the Mohs scale and asks only to be kept from long direct sun. Bloodstone suits people who want ballast, an opaque, pocketable stone with two thousand years of courage lore behind it, and it costs a fraction of fine beryl. Pisces birthdays through the twentieth can add amethyst from the older zodiac tables; Aries birthdays from the twenty first onward can look ahead to diamond. Hold each candidate for a slow breath and keep the one your shoulders trust.

Related Birthstones

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