how to disable birthday reminders in iOS and still view them in the calendar app?

Birthday reminders are nice but not if they keep popping up each day for every contact that has a birthday filled in. I don't need a popup birthday reminder. Especially not for every contact that has a birthday. I don't want to edit all contacts that I do or don't want to be notified about. Seeing them in the calendar app will be enough for me.

For this reason I decided to just turn the birthday notifications off.

One way of doing this is to disable calendar notifications. But that sucks... now all calendar notifications are turned off...

An other option would be to disable calendar birthday events but somehow I still get the annoying reminders popping up each day. ( And with me some others according to some forms I've read ) And this also disables viewing them in the calendar app.

Then I read this:

Go to Settings/Mail, Contacts, Calendars then Calendars section: Default Alert Times/Birthdays. Switch it to None.

I will know by tomorrow if the 'trick' above worked but since I didn't find any q/a how to disable all birthday reminders easily I posted this here in hope to find a good answer that will fix this problem once and for all. Maybe I found an answer but if you could confirm it that would be great!

Originaly asked the question for iOS 6, but this still is a valid question for later iOS versions ( v10 at the moment of editing )

Yes. This should work. As you are aware, when you (or the Facebook contact) inputs their birthday into the contact, iOS creates a new calendar called "Birthdays". On both iOS and OSX you have control over the notifications that you receive for each birthday that is on that calendar.

Like you said you could can go and turn of the notifications which should prevent notifications from actually appearing. Note, however that the birthdays should still show in Notification Center.

You can also disable the Birthday calendar on your iOS device altogether by opening the Calendar.app, tapping "Calendars" in the upper left corner, and scrolling down to and tapping on "Birthdays". You will see the check mark next to it disappear and the birthdays will no longer show in your calendar.

It, of course, would be easy to turn them back on temporarily in the future if you wanted to look up someone's birthday.

No, this doesn't work. Birthdays set to none in settings and Birthdays calendar unchecked and still getting those annoying facebook birthday reminders. Tried uninstalling facebook but that doesn't seem to work either. Facebook is like a persistent virus. Grr

On your iPhone, pull up your calendar. On the month view at the bottom center click Calendars. Unclick Birthdays from each of calendars you are subscribed to. Gmail, Yahoo, Facebook etc.

For iOS 10, go to Settings>Calendar>Default Alert Times>Birthdays. Switch it to None.