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September Baby Names: Sapphire, Aster, and Harvest Gold

Names for the year's busiest birth month — September's sapphire blues, aster blooms, and harvest-gold classics, each with its real rank in the SSA data.

September is, famously, the busiest birth month in the country — the one where hospitals staff up and the maternity ward hums. (Blame a cold December nine months earlier; the CDC’s natality data has shown the same late-summer bulge for decades.) Which means a lot of you are reading this with a September due date circled on the fridge.

The month comes with a ready-made kit of imagery: a sapphire birthstone, asters and morning glories for birth flowers, and a handover from Virgo to Libra somewhere around the 22nd. Underneath all of it, the harvest — the gold-and-russet part of the year that hasn’t quite tipped into cozy autumn yet.

Here’s what the actual popularity data says about names in each of those lanes. Some are wide open. A couple are having a genuine moment.

The sapphire blues

The literal one first: Sapphire sits at #1,057 with 233 babies last year, off a small peak of 301 in 2022. It’s a real name that stays firmly in gemstone territory — recognizable, almost never used.

If you want the color without the jewelry-counter feel, the field is better:

• Indigo — #854, and 2025 was its best year on record at 318 girls. Deep, dusky, faintly bohemian, still climbing.
• Celeste — “heavenly,” and also just sky. At #188 with 1,662 babies, and like Indigo it peaked last year. This is the sweet spot: familiar, romantic, not on every roster.
• Iris — the strongest name on this whole list. #61, 3,729 babies, an all-time peak in 2025. Iris is both a flower and a rainbow, which makes it quietly the most September-appropriate name here.
• Jade — #95, wrong gemstone but right register. Interestingly it peaked back in 2002 at 3,630 and has drifted since; it’s a name that already had its wave.
• Skye — the outlier going the other direction. #531 now, down from 887 girls at its 2014 peak. If you like it, you’d be picking it on the way down rather than up, which is a perfectly good reason to like it.

Aster, and the flower names that aren’t roses

Aster itself is barely used — #2,938, 57 girls last year. That’s genuine rarity, not “rare” the way Pinterest usually means it. It’s crisp, it’s a star (that’s literally what the word means), and almost nobody has it.

Its neighbors are better travelled:

• Dahlia — #215, 1,420 babies, peaking right now. Late-season bloomer, deep jewel colors, the most September flower on the list.
• Briar — #400 and at its all-time high. Thorny and soft at once.
• Poppy — #292, hovering near its 2023 peak of 1,077.
• Marigold — #590 and one of the fastest movers here; it’s more than six times the name it was a decade ago. Marigolds are the harvest flower, so this one earns its place twice.
• Flora — #607, and a proper revival story: it peaked in 1920 at 1,566 girls, disappeared for most of a century, and is on its way back.

Harvest gold

This is the part of the month I actually find most interesting, because the “golden” names are moving faster than anything else on this page.

• Goldie — #621, and nearly five times its level of ten years ago. It last peaked in 1915 at 1,051 girls, which makes it a textbook hundred-year-cycle revival, in the same family as the vintage names coming back.
• Aurelia — Latin for golden. #290, 1,056 babies, an all-time peak last year and roughly triple its 2015 self.
• Honey — #844 and up more than fivefold in a decade, peaking now. Sweeter than most people will risk, and that’s exactly why it’s still rare.
• Clementine — #456, at its all-time peak. Warm, a little old-fashioned, wearable at every age.
• Sunny — #390, just off its 2024 high of 846.
• Opal — #423, more than double its 2015 level, and another 1918-peak name (2,847 girls back then) on the way back up.

Virgo, Libra, and the harvest goddesses

September splits between two signs, and the mythology behind them is unusually name-friendly.

Astraea is the connective tissue: the star maiden, the figure Virgo is named for, who in most tellings carries the scales that became Libra. She covers the whole month by herself. At #1,805 with 112 girls she’s very rare — and up more than fivefold in ten years, so “rare” may not last.

Persephone (#735) is the harvest myth proper, the one whose exit ends the growing season. Juno (#1,252) is short, sharp, and at its own all-time peak.

For a September boy

The boys’ side leans on the month’s Roman roots and the last of the summer:

• August — #81 with 3,958 boys and peaking right now. Technically the month before, but nobody’s checking, and it’s the warmest of the calendar names.
• Augustine — #546, also at its all-time high, for the longer version.
• Atlas — #75, 4,413 boys, peaking now and up more than sixfold in a decade. One of the fastest-rising boys’ names in the entire dataset.
• Cyrus — #268, just off its 2024 peak. Means “sun.”
• Soren — #464, at its all-time high. Cool-toned, Scandinavian, pairs well with the blues above.
• Bruno — #740, russet-brown and underused. If you liked the nature-leaning boys’ names, it sits right beside them.

A note on picking any of this

None of these lists are a ranking of which name is better. A September baby named Olivia or Liam is not missing out on anything — those names are enormously popular because an enormous number of people love them, which is a completely reasonable thing to be. The month’s imagery is a nice place to start looking, not a rule you owe anybody.

What the data is genuinely good for is calibration. If you want a name almost no one else in the nursery will have, Aster at 57 babies a year and Astraea at 112 are actually rare. If you want something that feels fresh but not invented, Celeste and Aurelia are climbing without being everywhere. And if you fall for Iris or August, just know you’ve got good company — both are at their highest point in 145 years of records.

Source: U.S. Social Security Administration data.

Source: U.S. Social Security Administration data, 1880–2025.