Month in Colour Gold-Plated 925 Silver Birthstone Necklace

Solid 925 sterling silver, plated in gold. That is what you are buying, and that is where the money went.

Plated brass is the usual way to make a necklace look like this one. We do not make them that way, and we never have. Plating is a surface finish and every plating wears in the end — but when ours wears, what is underneath is sterling silver, the same metal in every other piece on this site. When plated brass wears, what is underneath is brass.

The stone is a small baguette, bezel-set, cut and coloured to the birthstone of a month.

It is cubic zirconia, not a natural gemstone. So the January is not garnet, the May is not emerald, and the April is very definitely not diamond. We put that here rather than in grey type at the bottom. Our natural stones live elsewhere on this site and they cost what natural stones cost.

A birthstone marks a date. It is not a claim about the stone, and we have not made one.

The twelve colours

Each month is cut to the colour of its own stone. They are not twelve shades of the same idea — they behave differently on the skin, and it is worth knowing which one you are choosing.

• January · Deep Red. Garnet red is darker than ruby red and browner than wine: the colour of a pomegranate seed held up to a window. It wears warmer against skin than it looks in a photograph.
• February · Purple. Amethyst purple sits between blue and red and refuses to settle, which is why it changes character under different light. Deep enough to read as formal at night, soft enough not to shout in daylight.
• March · Sky Blue. Aquamarine is Latin for sea water, and this is the pale end of it — the blue you see looking down through shallow water, not the blue of the horizon. The easiest of the twelve to wear alongside silver.
• April · Clear. April's colour is no colour. Diamond's whole proposition is the absence of it, so the April baguette is cut colourless and does its work with light instead. The most neutral of the twelve.
• May · Green. Emerald green is a specific green: blue-leaning, saturated, nothing like the green of leaves. It is the boldest colour on the list and the only one that reads as a statement from across a room.
• June · Lavender. The pale violet that moonstone throws and alexandrite holds in daylight. The quietest of the twelve — closer to grey than to purple in low light, and the colour most people cannot name when they see it.
• July · Red. Ruby red carries a trace of pink, and the pink is the point: chromium does it, the same element that makes the natural stone glow in sunlight. Warmer and brighter than January's red.
• August · Olive. Peridot green leans yellow where emerald leans blue, and it holds its colour under lamplight where other greens go grey. Jewellers used to call peridot the evening emerald for exactly that reason.
• September · Deep Blue. The deepest colour on the list and the most classical — the blue of stained glass and royal orders, chosen historically because it still reads as blue at a distance.
• October · Opal White. Not white, exactly. Opal's ground colour is a warm off-white with rose in it, and October is cut to that ground rather than to the flashes. The softest of the twelve.
• November · Amber. Citrine yellow, the colour of the merchant's stone. The only warm yellow on the list, and the one colour here that behaves like the gold around it rather than sitting next to it.
• December · Blue. The pale turquoise end of blue, where blue topaz and turquoise both land. Cooler than March, greener than September, and the most recognisably winter colour of the twelve.

Not sure which month you need? Type a date and we will find it →

The chain is fine and it sits high. It does not announce itself, which is the entire point of something worn every day rather than kept for an occasion.

Giving one

The birth month does most of the work for you — you do not have to guess a taste, only a date. A card can be written and packed with it at no charge.

Two of them side by side reads as a pair rather than a set: a mother and a child, two children, two people who share a house. The colours were chosen to sit together.

Posted to you tracked — 5–10 days to the UK.

Materials

• Solid 925 sterling silver, gold-plated
• Baguette-cut cubic zirconia in the birthstone colour of the month — laboratory-made, not a natural gemstone
• Twelve month options
• Free UK delivery · 5–10 days

A birthstone marks a date. Nothing here treats, prevents or cures anything.