Macrame jade bracelet in beige, tubes and tiger eye
50,90 €
Macrame jade bracelet on a beige cord: three green jade tubes, two tiger’s eye beads, and a tight braiding that holds the whole together.
No size to choose. The knot slides, you pull to tighten and spread to open: it passes the hand with nothing to handle, and is taken up now and then like a shoelace.
Only the tubes are jade. Tiger’s eye is a quartz, it does not belong to that family, and the treatment status of the green stone stays undetermined. Why I write it down.
A macrame jade bracelet on a beige cord: three green jade tubes, two tiger’s eye beads, and a tight braiding that holds the whole together. It has neither clasp nor size: the two strands slide one inside the other and the bracelet tightens in one movement, on any wrist.
In four lines
Beige macrame braiding, adjustable by a sliding knot: no size to choose.
Three green jade tubes, two tiger’s eye beads, on a mixed stringing.
Tiger’s eye is a quartz, not jade, and the page says so.
Comes off by sliding it, without undoing anything.
Macrame, and why it changes everything in use
Macrame is not a decoration, it is a mechanism. Two strands cross in flat knots tightened around the carrying strands, and the block of knots slides without coming undone. You pull to tighten, you spread to open, and the bracelet passes the hand with nothing to handle.
What that removes is all the rest: no size to measure, no clasp to close one handed, no elastic that slackens after a year. What it imposes is a habit: the knot loosens on its own with movement, and it has to be taken up now and then, like a shoelace.
The beige cord is the most discreet of the three colours of this stringing. It also gets dirty: it is braided thread, not metal, and it is cleaned in lukewarm water without soap, then dried flat.
Two stones, and only one is called jade
The three green tubes are announced as jade. The two golden brown beads are tiger’s eye, a fibrous quartz whose parallel fibres produce the moving reflection called chatoyancy. It is a fine stone, it has nothing to do with jade, and I am not going to let the whole pass for a bracelet entirely of jade.
On the tubes, the thing to do is the one for any row of drilled stone: look at the drill hole. On a dyed stone the colourant concentrates there and the rim is darker than the rest. The colour also follows the micro cracks, in a network, instead of spreading through the mass. The checks that need no equipment.
The tubes are not rigorously the same green from one example to the next, and that is rather a good sign: a perfectly reproducible colour is what a dye produces, not a rock.
Why I write macrame jade bracelet
Because it is the braiding that makes the piece, ahead of the stone: it is what decides the adjustment, the look and the price. The section carries two other cords of the same stringing, one black and one green, and that is the only choice to make.
Outside Burma, country of extraction not confirmed
What tradition attributes to jade and to the knot
What follows changes register, and I flag it rather than blending it into the rest of the page. Nothing here is demonstrated. These are customs and beliefs, which I report because they are part of the history of this stone. No piece in this shop is sold as a remedy, and I claim no effect for this one.
The knot that does not come undoneThe braided knot is one of the oldest motifs in Chinese jewellery, and the idea attached to it is lasting attachment rather than protection. Modern macrame does not descend from it directly, but it takes up the same reading. What tradition puts into a jade bracelet.
A stone of moral virtueIn 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.
Tiger's eye, another storyThe brown stone of this bracelet comes from a quite different tradition from jade, and what is attributed to it is above all a role of a gaze turned outward. I mention it so as not to let it be thought that the two stones tell the same story.
The jade you patinate by handA piece worn every day ends by taking a polish the workshop does not give. Tradition sees in it an exchange between the stone and its wearer; it is mostly friction, and it is quite real.
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.
