August Birthstone Peridot: Meteorites & Mistaken Names
Peridot is August’s birthstone. Sardonyx held the month first, peridot entered the 1912 American list as its alternate, and spinel was added in 2016.
The green comes from iron built into the mineral’s own formula rather than from a trace impurity. That is why peridot is almost never heated, dyed or treated at all.
The oldest known source is one island. Zabargad, in the Red Sea off southern Egypt, was worked from about the third century BC, and Egypt closed the mine in the 1950s.
Some peridot is not from this planet. Pallasite meteorites carry gem olivine, and the same mineral has been found on Mars and in comet dust.
Edward VII is recorded as naming peridot his favorite stone, which put green into a decade of jewelry otherwise built from platinum, diamonds and pearls.
The word topaz comes from an island, and the stone mined on that island was not topaz. Ancient writers called a fog-bound rock in the Red Sea Topazos. Pliny described the gem cut from it in 77 CE. What he described is what a jeweler now calls peridot. The name drifted onto a different mineral and stayed there. That was the first of several mix-ups. Five green stones on the Shrine of the Three Kings in Cologne Cathedral passed as emeralds for centuries. They are peridot. Accounts describe Cleopatra's emerald jewels, and the Egyptian island that gave up peridot sat inside her lands, so some of those stones were likely peridot too. The August birthstone peridot has spent most of its recorded life under another stone's name.
It also has a claim few other birthstones can make. Peridot is the gem form of olivine, one of the most common minerals in the solar system. Some of it lands here inside meteorites, and cutters have faceted stones out of that. The same mineral has been found on Mars and in comet dust brought home by the Stardust mission. A stone with that record spent the 1800s backed with foil to fix its color. Then it had a decade of high fashion because a king liked green. Two plain questions sit under all of it. What sets a fine peridot apart from a dull one, and how should a stone at 6.5 on the Mohs scale be set if you plan to wear it?
- Is August Birthstone Peridot or Sardonyx?
- What Makes One Peridot Better Than Another?
- Why Was Peridot Confused With Emerald and Topaz?
- Where Does Peridot Come From?
- How Did Victorian and Edwardian Jewelers Use Peridot?
- Is Peridot Durable Enough to Wear Every Day?
- How Do You Care for Peridot Jewelry?
Is August Birthstone Peridot or Sardonyx?
Both, on the modern American list, along with spinel. Sardonyx held August first. Peridot came in as its alternate in 1912, and spinel was added in 2016. Peridot is the stone people mean now.
The list came out of a trade meeting. The American National Retail Jewelers Association met in Kansas City in August 1912 and agreed on one set of stones for the home market. Before that, the months varied by country, by era, and in practice by whatever a jeweler had in the case.
One man objected in print. George Frederick Kunz was Tiffany's gemologist, and his 1891 book on birthstones is what made a standard list possible at all. A year after the meeting, in The Curious Lore of Precious Stones (1913), he printed the new table and then argued with it. Peridot's move was, in his words, "another undesirable change," one that "takes the chrysolite (peridot) from the place it has always occupied as the gem of September."
His own proof was hard to argue with. Kunz laid eight older birthstone traditions side by side, among them Jewish, Roman, Arabian, Polish, Russian and Italian ones. Chrysolite sits in September in six of the eight. August in those lists tends to go to carnelian, alexandrite or moonstone. Peridot had almost no historical claim on the month at all.
It won anyway, and it won on color. Sardonyx is a banded brown-and-white agate. Peridot is green. For a birthday gift that settles it, and the trade knew as much. Sardonyx stayed on the list and is still almost never asked for.
Modern lists also give peridot the sixteenth wedding anniversary. Take that as a modern convention rather than an inherited one, since Kunz's own table gives the sixteenth to topaz. The birthstone jewelry guide covers all twelve months. September's sapphire and July's ruby are the nearest stones on the calendar.
What Makes One Peridot Better Than Another?
Color first, then clarity, then size. The best stones are a deep grass green with no brown or yellow pulling at them. The color range is narrow, so small shifts in richness carry most of the gap in quality.
The green is built in. In most colored gems the color comes from a trace element that wandered into the crystal. In peridot, iron is part of the formula. Gemologists call that idiochromatic. Ferrous iron gives the green. Ferric iron pulls it toward yellow. Add more iron and the stone goes darker, toward brown. Bauer's 1904 reference put it in one line: the color is due wholly to the iron content, and more iron makes a darker stone.
Size and color travel together here, which is odd. Iron spreads more evenly through a large crystal, so a true grass green is easier to find above ten carats than below it. Stone from the San Carlos Apache Reservation in Arizona mostly comes in under five carats and lighter in tone. The Mogok tract in Myanmar and the Himalayan deposits in Pakistan give up the large stones with the deepest color.
Clarity is judged by eye. The signature flaw is a lily pad, a flat disc of liquid and gas that forms around a tiny crystal of spinel or biotite. Under a loupe it identifies the stone, and the trade lets it pass. Black chromite specks you can see without a loupe are another matter, and they pull the value down.
One optical trait does most of the work. Peridot's birefringence of 0.036 is the strongest of any gem but zircon. Look through the table and you see two of every back facet. Nothing else green does that. In stones over ten carats the same doubling softens the lines inside, an effect the trade calls sleepy, and a cutter turns the rough to keep it in hand.
What does not vary is treatment. Peridot is almost never treated, and no synthetic peridot has ever reached the trade. No heat, no dye, no filled cracks. A peridot cocktail ring holds a stone in the state it came out of the ground, which is true of very few colored gems. Cutters take it in step cuts and table cuts. The last polish is given with sulphuric acid rather than water, because the mineral gives up its surface to acid.
Why Was Peridot Confused With Emerald and Topaz?
Two different mix-ups. Emerald was a color mistake, made over centuries when nobody could test a stone. Topaz was a name mistake, and the name landed on the wrong mineral for good.
Start with the name. For most of its life this stone was chrysolite, from the Greek for golden stone. Pliny, in 77 CE, wrote about a leek-green gem he called topazos, taken from an island of that name in the Red Sea. The island is Zabargad and the stone was peridot. The word later stuck to the mineral sold as topaz today, which comes from nowhere near that island. Bauer's reference lists a shelf of misnomers still in use: Ceylonese chrysolite for olive-green tourmaline, Saxon chrysolite for greenish-yellow topaz, Cape chrysolite for prehnite.
The emerald error left objects behind. Five green stones on the Shrine of the Three Kings in Cologne Cathedral, each near two hundred carats, were taken for emeralds for centuries. Bauer states flatly that they are chrysolite. Kunz, writing apart from him and from a different field, names them the same way. Both rest the case on weight. Peridot is denser than emerald, so in pure methylene iodide a peridot sinks and an emerald floats. Gifts brought back from the Crusades carried Egyptian peridot into church treasuries, where the inventories recorded emerald.
Cleopatra's jewels run on the same logic. Her green stones came out of Ptolemaic Egypt, Zabargad sat inside those lands, and nobody then could tell the two minerals apart. Accounts describe the swap as likely, and no primary source proves it.
Telling them apart now takes seconds. Emerald leans blue-green and peridot leans yellow-green, and peridot never goes blue. Emerald holds three-phase flaws; peridot holds lily pads. Emerald is harder, 7.5 to 8 against peridot's 6.5 to 7. And the doubled back facets close the case, since emerald does not double at all. An emerald cut peridot can pass across a room and never at arm's length. May's emerald covers the other stone in full.
Where Does Peridot Come From?
From deep rock, and from space. Peridot is olivine, a main part of the earth's mantle, carried up by volcanoes. The same mineral turns up in meteorites, and some of that has been cut as gems.
Gem olivine forms in peridotite and in basalt. Almost none of it is clear enough or big enough to cut, which is how one of the planet's most common minerals yields an uncommon gemstone.
The oldest known source is one island. Zabargad, also called St. John's Island, sits in the Red Sea about eighty kilometers off Egypt's south coast, near the old port of Berenike. The mine there ran from the middle of the third century BC into the fifth century AD, and it fed Greek and Roman rings. Work restarted around 1900 under a firm set up for it, and the new workings reportedly gave up crystals as long as twenty centimeters. Egypt closed the mine in the 1950s. The largest cut peridot on record, a 311.8-carat stone at the Smithsonian, came off that island, and so did most of the old peridot in museum cases.
Kunz relays a story about the place from the geographer Agatharcides. The stone could not be seen there by day and gave itself away after dark by its own light, so diggers marked the spot and came back in daylight. That account looks like the root of the nickname evening emerald.
For a while the supply looked spent. Bauer records Kunz's view that by 1904 no chrysolite fit for cutting was being found anywhere, and that stones on the market had been recut from old ornaments. Peridot was briefly a finite antique, which is part of why late Victorian jewelers treated it as a scarce stone.
Supply came back in the twentieth century. Mogok in Myanmar became the source for the largest fine stones, some over a hundred carats. A find at Suppat in Pakistan in the 1990s added deep green rough from the Himalayas. Arizona's San Carlos Apache Reservation is now the largest commercial source, in smaller sizes and lighter tone. China, Vietnam, Tanzania and Norway all add to the supply.
Then there is the part that is not from here. Pallasite meteorites form at the edge of an asteroid's core, and they carry olivine crystals set in nickel-iron metal. Esquel in Argentina, Seymchan in Russia, Brahin in Belarus, Brenham in Kansas and Imilac in Chile have all yielded stone that can be cut, though a finished gem rarely passes half a carat. Olivine has been found on Mars, and in the comet dust the Stardust mission brought back. Meteorite peridot is sold as jewelry, which makes the claim about space literal rather than decorative.
How Did Victorian and Edwardian Jewelers Use Peridot?
Peridot had two good runs. The Aesthetic period of the 1880s and 1890s brought it back as a fashionable colored stone, and Edward VII made it briefly unavoidable after 1901.
Before either, the largest old holding sat in Istanbul. Hundreds of peridots are on show at the Topkapi Palace Museum, and the collection holds a throne of gold-plated walnut studded with the stone, recorded as a gift to Sultan Murad III in 1585. The sultans reached Zabargad through Egypt and they bought at a scale no European court matched. That is the one chapter of the stone's early history built on collecting rather than on curiosity.
The Victorian revival was a question of palette. Peridot's yellow-green suited the lighter colors and the enamel work of the 1880s and 1890s. It also came with a scarcity premium, since the trade thought the source was gone. Carlo Giuliano set peridots with diamonds and pearls in a gold-and-enamel necklace around 1890, now in the Smithsonian's holdings, the kind of polychrome composition the Aesthetic period wanted.
The construction of those decades is checkable, which matters if you are buying. Bauer records that pale peridots were backed with green foil and better stones with gold foil, to push the color forward inside a closed setting. Cutting ran to table and step cuts, sometimes with a curved table facet that sits halfway between a facet and a cabochon. An antique peridot ring with a closed, foiled back is doing what the period meant it to do, not hiding a fault.
Then a king moved the market. Edward VII reigned from 1901 to 1910, green was his color, and he is recorded as naming peridot his favorite stone. The fashion that followed took one form: clear green peridots in necklaces and pendants, ringed with small diamonds, worn as a nod to the king. That is stranger than it sounds. Edwardian jewelry was otherwise an all-white case, platinum and diamonds and pearls, with openwork built to carry light instead of color. Kashmir sapphire was the only colored stone the era let in with any regularity. Peridot got in on a royal preference and broke the house rule.
Peridot got in on a royal preference and broke the house rule
The handwork movements took it up in parallel. C.R. Ashbee made a peridot and pearl necklace for the Guild of Handicraft around 1903, now at the Victoria and Albert Museum. In America, Frank Gardner Hale worked peridot into two pieces the Metropolitan Museum of Art holds: a gold and opal pendant of about 1910, and a necklace of about 1920 that adds amethyst, tourmaline, sapphire and pearl. Marcus & Co., set up in 1892 by a former Tiffany man, built a house palette out of these very stones, zircon and chrysoberyl and tourmaline and opal and garnet and beryl and spinel and peridot, chosen on purpose. Cartier is reported to have used peridot for the eyes of its panther jewels from the late 1920s, next to emerald.
Peridot from those decades moves through the estate market rather than sitting in it. Filigree's vintage jewelry turns it up most often the way the period used it, set among other colored stones rather than alone.
Is Peridot Durable Enough to Wear Every Day?
For earrings, pendants and bracelets, yes, with little thought. For a ring worn daily, the setting decides it. Peridot sits at 6.5 to 7 on the Mohs scale, just under quartz, and that one fact drives all of the advice below.
Pliny caught the problem in the first century. He wrote that peridot is the only precious stone affected by an iron file, and that it wears away with use. Both hold up. Household dust is mostly quartz, quartz is harder, and a peridot table loses its polish over years of it.
Hardness is only half the story. Cleavage is weak, which is good news, since the stone will not split along a plane inside it. It is brittle, so a bare edge chips, and it breaks in curved flakes like shell. It also dislikes a sudden change in temperature, which rules out steam.
So the mount does the work. A bezel wraps the girdle and takes the knocks the stone cannot. A flush setting drops the stone into the metal so nothing stands above the band, the most protective mount available and the reason a peridot stacking ring can be worn all day. A halo of small diamonds guards the edge of a larger center stone. A slightly thicker girdle helps in any of them. What to avoid is a tall prong solitaire on a working hand, which puts the weakest part of a soft stone at the highest point.
By type the answer is short. Earrings and pendants take almost no knocks. A bracelet takes some. A ring takes them all. Peridot is still harder than opal at 5.5 to 6.5, and antique opal has been worn in bezels for a century and a half. A peridot ring is wearable. It is not the ring to move furniture in.
Metal shifts the color as much as the setting guards the stone. Yellow gold warms the green and pulls it toward olive. Platinum and white gold cool it, which flatters a rich stone and exposes a pale one. Victorian jewelers were solving the same thing with foil, and the choice under it has not changed much.
How Do You Care for Peridot Jewelry?
Warm water, mild dish soap, a soft brush. Nothing hot, nothing ultrasonic, nothing acidic.
Peridot jewelry care comes down to three things to avoid, and two of them are machines. An ultrasonic cleaner drives rapid vibration through a brittle stone that tends to hold flaws inside it, and a flaw is where a crack starts. A steamer adds heat shock on top of that. Neither belongs near this stone at any age or in any mount.
Acid is the third. Cutters finish peridot with sulphuric acid rather than water for the plain reason that the mineral gives up its surface to acid. House cleaners, pool chlorine and hair spray do the same thing, more slowly. Take a peridot ring off before you clean a bathroom, and put jewelry on after scent rather than before it.
Storage is easy once you know the rule. Almost everything else in a jewelry box is harder than peridot, so it wants its own pouch or a lined slot rather than a shared tray. Wrapping a peridot pendant loose with a diamond ring is how a good stone picks up a scratched table.
Wear does not end a piece. A dulled peridot can usually be repolished, and a damaged one can be swapped in an old mount without touching the metalwork. That is part of why so much late Victorian peridot jewelry can still be worn today. Have the setting checked once a year, the same as any colored stone, and have a bezel edge looked at if the ring takes daily knocks. The jewelry care guide covers cleaning by stone type.
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Peridot Jewelry
August’s stone across the range, from a flush-set stacking ring to a platinum line bracelet of emerald-cut peridot.
Browse Peridot →Vintage Jewelry
Where estate peridot turns up, usually the way the Victorians used it, set among other colored stones.
Browse Vintage →Birthstone Jewelry Guide
The full birthstone calendar with Filigree’s pieces for every month of the year.
View the Guide →A stone under someone else’s name
Peridot's history is largely a history of being taken for something else. It gave its island's name to a different mineral, sat on a medieval shrine as an emerald, and probably passed as emerald on Cleopatra as well. Looked at directly, it is a gem colored by iron in its own formula, pulled from one Red Sea island for two thousand years, and now and then delivered by meteorite. Filigree's peridot jewelry runs from a flush-set stacking ring to a platinum line bracelet holding fifty-seven carats of emerald-cut stones, which is close to the full range the stone covers.
Ready to Find Your August Stone
From a flush-set stacking ring to a platinum line bracelet holding fifty-seven carats of emerald-cut peridot, the collection covers the range of the stone.
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August Birthstone Peridot
How can you tell if a peridot is real?
Look through the table at ten times magnification. Peridot's strong double refraction shows two of every back facet, and green glass does not do that. Lily-pad inclusions, flat discs of liquid and gas, are a second confirmation. There is no meaningful synthetic peridot trade, so the imitations to watch for are glass and other green stones rather than a made version of the same mineral.
Is peridot found in meteorites?
Yes. Pallasite meteorites carry olivine crystals set in nickel-iron metal, and gem-quality pieces have been faceted from named falls including Esquel, Seymchan and Brahin. Cut stones rarely pass half a carat, because the conditions that formed them were not kind to large crystals. Olivine has also been found on Mars and in returned comet dust.
Is peridot rarer than emerald?
No. Emerald is the scarcer stone by a wide margin, and peridot is one of the more available colored gems in small and medium sizes. Peridot does get scarce at the top, though. A clean grass-green stone over ten carats from Myanmar or Pakistan is genuinely difficult to find.
What is chrysolite?
It is the older name for peridot, and it was the standard one into the twentieth century. The word also survives as a misnomer attached to several unrelated stones, including olive-green tourmaline and greenish-yellow topaz, so an old label saying chrysolite is a starting point rather than an identification.
Can peridot be an engagement ring stone?
Yes, with the right setting and clear expectations. At 6.5 to 7 on the Mohs scale peridot will scratch sooner than a sapphire and will want repolishing at some point, which is straightforward work. A bezel, a low halo, or a flush setting protects it. A tall prong solitaire on a hand you use all day does not.
