Sapphire represents the birthstone for the month of September. This beautiful jewel is just one of the stones, which are assigned for a number of Zodiac signs including Taurus, Pisces, Sagittarius and Virgo. It is also considered as a stone, which may be given for a fifth, twenty-third, forty-fifth and sixty-fifth wedding anniversary.

Sapphire, the birthstone of September is the 2nd hardest natural mineral, having the hardness of nine on the Mohs scale. Though sapphire is mostly found in blue color, still it is available in lots of other colors like green, yellow, white, orange, pink, brown, and purple. You can also get some colorless sapphires. The september birthstone is rarely found in orange-pink color, but this type of sapphire is considered to be the most precious as compared to any other sapphire.

The sapphires, which have inclusions of several small needles, represent a kind of optical property known as asterism. It might be the star-shaped effect, which can be observed in star sapphires. This effect can also be noticed in cabochon cuts. The star sapphires normally consist of six ray stars, but some of them have twelve rays.
Some of the sapphires are known to display different colors under different sorts of light. These sapphires are called the color changing sapphires. Let me explain it with the help of an example that there is a sapphire, which looks blue when it is seen in the natural light but if you watch it in the artificial light you won’t believe that it will be seen as a violet colored sapphire. This is the beauty of this type of sapphire, but unfortunately these sapphires are very rarely found. You can also observe the color changing effect in Alaxenrite.