Nephrite jade bangle in spinach green, polished solid
97,90 €
Nephrite jade bangle in spinach green, carved from a single piece, round in section and polished solid. A dark, uneven green, with black specks you can see plainly.
It is sized by inner diameter, not wrist size: it has to pass your closed hand, thumb tucked in. Measure before you order, it does not open and cannot be resized.
No metal, no thread: the stone is bare, therefore weighable, and the figure will be published here with its date. Treatment status undetermined. Why I write it down.
A nephrite jade bangle in spinach green, carved from a single piece, round in section and polished solid. The green is dark and it is not even: it lightens in patches, darkens elsewhere, and carries black specks you can see plainly. That is exactly what you should expect from nephrite, and this listing explains why.
In four lines
Carved from a single piece: no hinge, no clasp, no solder.
Sized by inner diameter, measured across your closed hand.
Uneven green and black specks: the material has not been made uniform.
Bare stone, therefore weighable: the figure will be published here, with its date.
It Does Not Open, So You Measure First
A bangle has neither hinge nor clasp, and it cannot be resized: jade is far too tough to be cut open and soldered back like metal. So the only question that matters before you buy is whether your hand will go through, and a tailor’s tape settles it.
It is not the wrist you need to measure. Close your hand, tuck your thumb as deep into your palm as it will go, measure around the widest point, and divide by 3.14: that gives you the minimum inner diameter. Add one or two millimetres, because a bangle that only just goes on will go on once, cold, and will not go back on during a heat wave. The method in detail, and the size guide.
An Uneven Green, and Why That Is Good News
This piece is not a uniform green. It carries lighter zones, zones that are almost bottle green, and black specks and streaks plainly visible to the naked eye. In an ordinary catalogue this would be presented as a flaw, or passed over in silence.
In fact it is the opposite of a warning sign. Nephrite frequently carries dark inclusions, and its colour falls in bands and patches because the iron did not settle evenly. What should give you pause is a colour that is rigorously identical everywhere, or a colour that follows a network of cracks rather than the body of the stone: that is what dye produces. The checks that need no equipment at all.
I do not turn that into proof, though. The treatment status of this piece is undetermined, like everything in this catalogue, and an irregularity certifies nothing. It only makes the dye hypothesis less convenient.
Nephrite, and What That Word Changes
This piece is listed as nephrite, a calcium amphibole. It is one of the two minerals the word jade covers, the other being jadeite, a pyroxene. A Frenchman separated them: in 1863, Alexis Damour established that they are two unrelated species, and it took a laboratory to do it. What sets them apart.
Spinach green is nephrite’s signature: it comes from iron, where jadeite’s green comes from chromium and rings clearer. And on a thin ring like this one, nephrite has a real advantage: it is the tougher of the two, its interlocking fibers resisting the spread of a crack even better. Its hardness stays ordinary, 6 to 6.5. The difference between hardness and toughness.
Wearing It, and What Actually Damages It
Once in place, a bangle sits snug and barely turns. If it turns a lot, it is too big and it will knock against tables and door handles. What wears it day to day is not impact: it is the quartz in everyday dust, which rates 7 on the Mohs scale against 6 to 6.5 for nephrite, and which dulls the curve over time.
Lukewarm water, mild soap, a soft cloth, and a pouch it has to itself. Never an ultrasonic cleaner, never steam, never solvents: since the treatment status is unknown, any resin there might be would not survive them. Care in detail.
Additional information
Stone
Néphrite
Colour
Spinach green
Stone shape
Solid bangle
Motif
No motif
Mounting
Rigid bangle
Metal
None
Setting
No setting
Worn by
Unisex
Paired stones
None, jade only
Mineral family
Calcic amphibole
Hardness (Mohs)
6 to 6.5
Reference density
2.90 to 3.03 g/cm³
Toughness
Exceptional, interlocking crystals
Treatment
Not determined
Origin
Outside Burma, country of extraction not confirmed
What Tradition Attaches to the Jade Bangle
What follows changes register, and I flag it rather than blend it into the rest of the listing. None of it is proven. These are customs and beliefs, old and documented, that I report because they are part of this stone's history. No piece in this shop is sold as a remedy, and I claim no effect for this one.
The left wristSeveral Chinese traditions link wearing the bangle on the left wrist to the idea of receiving rather than giving. The custom is widespread; no basis for it is known beyond the custom itself.
Never taking it offA bangle goes on once and stays on, sometimes for a lifetime. The closed shape has much to do with it: this is not a piece of jewellery you choose in the morning, it is an object you wear.
The bangle that breaksTradition holds that a broken bangle took the blow in place of the person wearing it. It is a reading made after the fact, and what it really says is how much attachment goes into a piece worn for a long time.
The scholar's stoneIn Confucian thought, jade is associated with qualities of character rather than effects on the body: uprightness, constancy, restraint. It is the best documented meaning of them all, and it is nephrite the old texts describe, since jadeite only reached China in the 18th century.
Dispatched within 48 hours of your order being confirmed, for delivery within 14 days from dispatch. I keep no buffer stock, and I won’t promise a timeframe I couldn’t meet.
Postage charges
€6.99 to any destination, free on orders of €47 or more to France, Belgium, Switzerland and Luxembourg. The exact amount appears in the cart before you pay.
The packaging, and why it matters
Every piece ships in its own pouch, kept apart from the others. This isn’t about presentation: the hardness of jade is ordinary, between 6 and 6.5 for nephrite and 6.5 to 7 for jadeite, and the quartz in everyday dust sits at 7. Two pieces of jewellery that travel together end up scratching each other.
Fourteen days to change your mind
With no need to explain yourself. An email is enough to open a return, there is no form to fill in. Return postage is at your expense, unless the piece doesn’t match its listing or arrives damaged.
The wrong size is the main reason for a return in this category, and jade cannot be resized the way a solid metal band can. Two minutes of measuring almost always prevents it. The size guide.
Warm water, mild soap, a soft cloth. A very soft brush for the hollows of a carving. That’s all, and it’s enough.
What you must never do, and why
No ultrasonic cleaner, no steam, no solvent, no heat source. This isn’t a token precaution: the treatment status of my pieces is not established. My supplier doesn’t know, and weighing establishes the mineral without saying anything about a possible resin impregnation. Resin tolerates neither heat nor solvents, so every piece is handled as though it might contain some. The information sheet on treatments.
Scratches, and where they come from
Jade is tough, meaning very hard to break: its interlocking crystal structure resists fracturing, and that is why axes could be shaped from it in the Neolithic. Its hardness, on the other hand, is ordinary, 6 to 6.5 for nephrite and 6.5 to 7 for jadeite. The quartz in everyday dust sits at 7: that is what dulls jade, not knocks. The difference between the two.
Day to day
Put the piece on after perfume and cream, never before. Take it off for housework, gardening and sport, where the knocks against corners happen. Store each piece on its own, in its pouch. On a strand of beads, the thread wears out before the stone: it gets restrung, and there is nothing abnormal about that.
My name is Jade. I’m French, from Morbihan, and based in Tallinn. I choose the pieces and have them set: I mine nothing, I cut nothing, and I don’t do the metalwork myself. The work I do is the sorting, and with this material that is what decides everything.
I am neither a gemmologist, nor a lapidary, nor a therapist, and I don’t claim to be.
I weigh, I don’t certify
Before putting a reference online, I order one example of it for myself. When it reaches me unset, I weigh it in air, then suspended from a thread in a glass of water: the ratio of the two masses gives the density, and that figure separates jadeite, nephrite, serpentine and dyed quartzite without ambiguity.
One example per reference, not every piece. I don’t handle the piece that goes out to you, and I would rather say so than let you believe otherwise. The method, with its three limits.
What I can’t know
The treatment status of my pieces. My supplier doesn’t know, and the scales say nothing about it: they establish the mineral, not the resin impregnation. Only infrared spectroscopy in a laboratory would settle it, and I don’t have that done. So you will never read “jadeite A”, “type A” or “untreated” on this site. The information sheet.
Where my jade comes from
No Burmese jadeite, and the first reason is a legal one. Not the reason you read everywhere: the JADE Act of 2008 did indeed ban these stones in the United States, but that ban was lifted on 7 October 2016. What applies today dates from 8 April 2021: the US Treasury sanctioned Myanma Gems Enterprise, the state-owned company that controls the Burmese gem trade. So there is no general ban, but an American is not allowed to trade with that entity, and a stone never tells you where it has passed through. One single supply chain for ten markets: it has to hold up for the most demanding of them. When an origin isn’t confirmed to me in writing, the listing doesn’t state it. My sourcing policy.
