Superstitions

This past Friday (the 13^th) we reached out to our Facebook community and asked them of any specific jewelry superstitions that they were aware of.  I, having spent my entire life around jewelry, had never really come across any jewelry-related superstitions, and thought the responses on Facebook would be minimal at best.  I was sure wrong on this one.

Not being a particularly superstitious guy (besides my own private quirks of course) and not counting karma, which I’m convinced science will prove as factual one of these days, I found the responses very interesting. They ranged from those hearing that it is bad luck to wear opals if you were born outside of the month of October (opal is the birthstone for October), to it being bad luck to wear pearls on someone’s wedding day.

I had never heard of any particular gemstone being bad luck for someone to wear, but I suppose it is no different than any other superstition.  I can only imagine that sometime, somewhere, something horrible happened to someone wearing an opal who was born on a month other than October, and the rest became a part of history in some form of storytelling.  If you’ve ever heard of an origin from a given superstition, they usually turn out to be as absurd as an occurrence such as this. That being said, I know that Shane Co. sells a lot of pearls to a lot of brides, bridesmaids, and fathers-of-brides to gift to their daughter, all with the intention for the bride to don them on her big day.  Let’s hope that that superstition is debunked for everyone’s cause!

The only response that I read that I did hear of previously was that it is bad luck to try on someone else’s engagement or wedding ring.  Unfortunately, I learned about this superstition first hand.

Shortly after getting engaged last summer, my fiancée and I saw my mother for the first time since the engagement took place.  Of course, as I imagine most mothers do, she asked to see the ring.  When sticking her hand out wasn’t enough, my new bride-to-be reluctantly took the ring off of her hand.  I, paying next to no attention to the entire interaction, must have caught a glimpse of my fiancée’s face, because I instantly knew that somehow this happy time turned into something very displeasing to her.  After thanking mom for the congrats, the two of us walked away and of course the first thing to come out of my mouth was something like, “what possibly could have happened back there to cause you to make that face?”  Well, apparently my mother put the ring on her pinky finger for a moment.

So there’s one superstition I now follow, albeit more for accident avoidance than for a supernatural belief, but in the end it’s all the same, isn’t it?   I’d venture a guess that, as with other superstitions, they are only as powerful as you allow them to be. As far as I’m concerned, wear pearls on your wedding day, if you’re born in May, go ahead and try on an Opal, and try on someone else’s engagement or wedding ring. All of this, of course, is dependent on how your fiancée feels. As with just about everything else, it’s best to check with her first.