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Anniversary stones
Every year from the first to the sixtieth, with the one thing the traditional lists never mention: whether the stone is hard enough to actually wear.
The whole list
| Year | Traditional | Stone | Wearable daily? |
|---|
Anniversary questions
- What is the 40th wedding anniversary stone?
- Ruby. It is one of the best known of the whole list, and conveniently one of the two coloured stones hard enough at Mohs 9 to wear every day.
- What is the traditional 30th anniversary gift?
- Pearl. Worth knowing that pearl is Mohs 2.5 to 4.5, porous and dissolved by perfume, so it belongs in earrings or a pendant rather than a ring worn daily.
- Which anniversaries have gemstones?
- The modern list assigns a stone to every year from the first to the twentieth, then to each fifth year after that. The first is gold, the tenth diamond, the fifteenth ruby on some lists and the sixtieth diamond again.
- Are anniversary stones traditional or invented?
- Both. The metal years, gold at fifty and silver at twenty five, are genuinely old. The full year-by-year gemstone list was largely standardised by the jewellery trade in the twentieth century, which does not make it less enjoyable.
- What can I give for an anniversary if the stone is too soft to wear?
- Set it in something that does not take knocks. A pendant, a pair of earrings or a brooch will keep a soft stone looking new for decades, where a ring will not.