October Birthstone Rings

This article is part of our Birthstone Rings series, where we share the beautiful and varied ways our customers have featured birthstones in their rings.

October's birthstones — opal and tourmaline

Officially, October's two birthstones are opal and pink tourmaline. But we'd suggest you can be open to other tourmaline colors. And there are a lot of them! That's one of the reasons we recommend tourmaline as your center stone choice for an October birthstone.

Phew! That's tough to say. We're such big fans of opal that it's really hard to say we don't recommend opal. Let's be clear: we love opal and we happily design opal rings every day. But it's a more delicate stone, so make sure you're familiar with its durability characteristics before you choose it as a center stone. If you're comfortable with what you've read, there's a world of unique opals to choose from in creating a ring that's uniquely you.

So, why tourmaline? It's a gem with a lot of color variety and it earns a very good wearability rating, so it will hold up well as a ring's center stone. Pink and green are the best known and most popular tourmaline colors. But there are many shades, and you can even find multi-colored stones, like the bi-color watermelon tourmaline we'll show off below.

Tourmaline rings

This first ring starts with the most classic choice: pink tourmaline. But this beautiful, pear cut gem is anything but ordinary. The one we chose with this customer has a deeper, purple-pink color in bright lighting. In fact, its color is so deep that, in some lighting, it almost looks like a red ruby. A truly striking center stone around which we designed a delicate frame-like setting with curls of filigree, a braided rope band, and milgrain.

As promised, here's one of our favorite gems — watermelon tourmaline. These bi- or tri-color gems feature a transition from pink to green (sometimes with a bit of yellow along the way), like a perfect slice of watermelon. An elongated shape, like this emerald cut, is typically designed to showcase that transition along its length. For this ring, we surrounded it with a halo of sparkling diamonds, and two bullet-cut diamonds transition to the rose gold band, a unique diamond shape for a bit of eye-catching geometry.

And here's a green tourmaline, representing the other popular color for this birthstone. This gem, too, is unusual. For the less common elongated hexagon shape and the distinctive blue-green hue this customer was looking for, we re-cut a larger tourmaline into this beautiful shape. It's bezel set, reinforcing its beautiful geometry, and surrounded by bezel set diamond clusters. It's one of those designs that, when we create it right, looks instantly like a classic from decades ago!

Opal rings

And now we're going to show off opal rings. More opal rings than tourmaline rings, even though we recommended tourmaline for this month's birthstone. Can you tell we're conflicted? 😅

This three-stone ring provides the perfect transition! Its center stone is a black opal with vivid red and orange color play, and it's surrounded by two pink tourmalines. Double-prongs bring in an old world bit of styling and give us a perfectly October-y birthstone ring.

Here's a white opal in a diamond halo. A swirl of cooler blues and greens in this opal's play-of-color pair beautifully with the white gold setting. Set on a contemporary twisting shank with little leaf accents and lots of diamonds for sparkle.

This rose gold bridal set embraces vintage styling in its curves and swirls of ornamentation. This customer told us he was looking for a unique, mystical ring that would take his partner's away the moment she saw it. We chose an understated white opal for the center stone, whose green and purple pastels stand in pretty contrast to the vivid rose gold around it.

This center stone is a crystal opal, which would be hard to tell because of the vivid color play it shows face up. But viewed from other angles, its body is open and transparent, which makes the green and yellow swirl all the more vivid. We designed a sunburst halo ring with a slightly tapered band to showcase this stunning center stone.

This final white opal ring showcases the pastel colors that, in the US at least, are one of the most popular looks for white opal. Subtle flashes of green, purple and yellow in this Australian sapphire, surrounded by a twisting halo in rose gold. And the band echoes the halo's twist in its diamond setting.