July Birthstone - Ruby

Healing Properties and Interesting Information

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Healing

A sign of passion and virility, ruby has the power to stimulate sexual desire. It helps to cure peptic ulcer, fever, rheumatism, gout etc.

Where Found

Rubies come from alluvial sources such as Sri Lanka and Burma. Myanmar (formerly Burma) is the source for the most prized rubies - those with the deep "pigeon blood" color. However, Thailand is now the primary world source for the gemstone. Sri Lanka, Vietnam, and Tanzania also have important deposits of rubies, and Australia, Pakistan, Russia, Norway, and the United States (North Carolina and Montana) are secondary sources.

History, mythology

The ancient lapidaries spend considerable time with ruby. "Those be rubies, fairy favors:" a line from Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream Shakespeare mentioned rubies several times in his various writings Until improvements in chemical testing in the 1800s, most red gem-quality stones were called rubies. Many of the famous "rubies" in the crown jewels of Europe have since been identified as red spinels or garnets. Large rubies are incredibly rare and can cost more than diamonds. In the thirteenth century, traveler Marco Polo wrote that Kublai Kahn, the Mongol Emperor of China, once offered an entire city for a ruby the size of a man's finger.A luminous stone, a ruby once supposedly lit an entire chamber in a Chinese palace. Historically, rubies were thought to bestow wisdom, health, luck in gambling, and success with the opposite sex. In the Middle Ages, it was believed that a ruby could warn its owner of misfortunes by deepening in color.

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