Vardy's Jewelers

October babies have it rough. For one, they have to compete with Halloween – maybe their birthday is ON Halloween. Who wants that? Everyone is too busy taking selfies with their pumpkin spice lattes to take you out to dinner.

The great thing about being an October baby is you have the amazing opal as your birthstone – but maybe opal isn’t your thing. Maybe you like green, or pink, or blue, or red, or stones with a mix of those colors. Good news – you have Tourmaline!

Tourmaline takes its name from the Sinhalese word toramalli, or “mixed gems”, which became what the Dutch merchants in what is currently Sri Lanka called the multicolored pebbles that washed up in the riverbeds of Ceylon.

Before modern mineralogy, tourmaline was commonly mistaken for other gemstones like ruby or emerald based on its color. Few stones come in as many colors as tourmaline, from the rich reds and magentas of Rubellite to the eye-burning electric blue of the Paraiba tourmaline, named after the region in Brazil where they were first found. Tourmalines – including several beautiful pieces handmade by Vardy’s Jewelers – can even have multiple colors, leading to the popular “watermelon” variety.

Tourmalines also have a uniquely Californian history – some of the world’s finest tourmaline comes from a handful of mines outside San Diego. In the 1800s, the Dowager Empress of China Tz’u Hsi was a great admirer of the rich pink colors produced by the California mines; she and her devotees were responsible for a booming market, with hundreds of thousands of carats crossing the Pacific annually. When the Chinese government collapsed in 1912, it took the California mines with it; today only a handful of these mines are still operational. Some are open to the public and you can even dig for your own gemstones!

Every color you can imagine and the posthumous approval of deposed Chinese royalty; what else could you possibly want, October babies?