June Jewels

Symbols

Alexandrite shares its status as a June birthstone with cultured pearl and moonstone.
The gemstone has been thought to bring luck, good fortune, and love. It is also said to strengthen intuition, creativity, and imagination and encourages romance.
Alexandrite’s dramatic colour change is described as “emerald by day, ruby by night”, the phenomenon itself is often called “the alexandrite effect”. 

The jewel is the very rare colour change variety of the mineral chrysoberyl.  However, the striking colour change doesn’t arise from the gem’s pleochroism, but rather from the mineral’s unusual light-absorbing properties.
Its origins date back to 1934 in Russia’s Ural Mountains near the Tokovaya River. The gem was named after the young Alexander II (1818-1881) and it caught the country’s attention because its red and green colours which mirrored the Imperial Russian flag and so it became the national stone of tsarist Russia.

The original source in Russia's Ural Mountains has long since closed after producing for only a few decades and only a few stones can be found on the market today. However, in 1987, a new find of alexandrite was made in Brazil at a locality called Hematita. Other places where it’s found is Sri Lanka and East Africa.

The newer deposits contain some fine-quality stones, but many displays less-precise colour change and muddier hues than the nineteenth-century Russian alexandrites.

The prices 

The value of Alexandrite varies depending on the size and quality of the gemstone. The most important factors are the strength of the color change, color saturation under varying lighting conditions, clarity and size. Alexandrites with a strong color change are very valuable and clean stones over 1 carat are very rare.
When evaluating alexandrite, pay the most attention to the color change: the more dramatic and complete the shift from red to green, without the bleeding through of brown from one color to the next, the rarer and valuable the stone.

While Alexandrites found favor in the jewelry salons of St. Petersburg, it was America’s Tiffany Company that seems to have done the most to popularize the gem.
The greatest alexandrite specimen ever found is housed in Moscow's Fersman Mineralogical Museum.