Birthstone
Citrine
Usually described as yellow to amber.
There is no plate for citrine because the nineteenth century did not draw it as a thing of its own. Sowerby, Kurr, Mawe and Bauer all file yellow quartz under quartz, and the gem trade of the day sold it as “Scotch topaz” or “false topaz” — names that tell you it was valued for resembling something else.
- Colour
- yellow to amber
- Month
- November
- Status
- Added laterCitrine was added to November in 1952 by the Jewelry Industry Council of America. The two lists compared.
Name and history
The gem carries the colour word citrine, lemon-coloured, which English took from French citrin and ultimately from the Latin citrus.
What it actually is
| Species | Quartz |
|---|---|
| Composition | SiO₂ |
| Crystal system | trigonal |
| Hardness | 7 on the Mohs scale. About as hard as the quartz in household dust. |
| Cleavage | none; conchoidal fracture |
| What makes the colour | colour centres in the quartz lattice rather than a simple trace ion — the older attribution is to ferric iron (Fe³⁺), and heat-treated amethyst does yellow by conversion of its iron colour centre, but recent work attributes the colour of much natural citrine to aluminium-based colour centres instead; the assignment is genuinely disputed |
| Mined in | Brazil, Bolivia, Madagascar, Zambia, Uruguay |
Hardness, composition and crystal system are standard mineralogical values. Where published sources disagree, the range given covers them.
How it gets damaged
Hard and uncleavable but brittle; thermal shock can fracture it, prolonged strong light can fade the colour, and heat-induced colour in treated stones can shift if it meets a jeweller's torch.
What is routinely done to it
Most commercial citrine is amethyst heated above roughly 440 °C, which converts the violet colour centre to yellow-orange; natural citrine is comparatively rare.
This describes the physical stone. Nothing on this site claims a gemstone has any therapeutic or healing effect — see the disclaimer.
Which list it is on
| Month | The 1912 list | Today's list |
|---|---|---|
| November | — | Yes |