Dark green jade bracelet: polished, domed plaques in a dense green, joined edge to edge on a double elastic. No engraving.
A bare surface makes up for nothing: all you see is the colour, the polish and what light the stone lets through. It is the most demanding way of presenting a jade.
On a deep green the weighing separates widely. It will say nothing about the treatment, which stays undetermined. Why I write it down.
A dark green jade bracelet: polished, domed plaques in a dense and deep green, joined edge to edge on a double elastic. No engraving, no motif: nothing but the stone and its polish, which is the most demanding way of presenting a jade.
In four lines
Smooth, domed slabs, with no engraving at all.
A dense, deep green, which lightens on the crest of each dome.
Joined edge to edge on two elastics: the ring stays flat and does not twist.
Taken at the wrist, it goes on by stretching.
A bare surface, and why that is more demanding
An engraved motif makes up for a great deal: it breaks the reflections, it occupies the eye, it masks irregularities in the material. A smooth plaque makes up for nothing. All you see is the colour, the polish and what light the stone lets through.
That is why this model is the one you have to look at hardest before buying. The dome of each slab walks a bright line when you turn the wrist, and that line reveals the material: on a stone it catches variations of grain; on a resin or a glass it slides evenly.
Jade takes a greasy polish, slightly oily, quite different from the vitreous shine of a glass. It is an impression more than a measurement, but it can be checked with the naked eye, and that is exactly what this format gives you to see.
A dense green, and what to ask of it
The colour is deep, frank, clearly stronger than the water greens of the section. Laid flat under a lamp it looks almost opaque; in front of a window it opens and lets the daylight through on the edges of each slab.
It is that passage of light you have to look for. A stone coloured through its mass by a transition metal stays translucent; a colourant laid in the porosity of a rock blocks it and makes it opaque. Translucency is not a proof, but its total absence over a thickness of a few millimetres is a bad sign.
The slabs should not be rigorously the same green from one end of the row to the other. A colour perfectly reproducible over fifteen pieces is what a dye produces, not a rock.
What the scale will settle, and what it will not
On a dark, saturated green the weighing does real work: it clearly separates a jade, at 2.90 at least, from a serpentine or a quartzite around 2.6. Those three quarters of a unit are confused with no kitchen scale uncertainty.
What it will not say is the treatment. A jadeite impregnated with resin weighs like a jadeite. Only infrared spectroscopy in a laboratory would settle it, and I do not have that done. The record on this page says so on the Treatment line, and it will go on saying so after the weighing.
Outside Burma, country of extraction not confirmed
What tradition attributes to the green of jade
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.
Dark green and restraintDeep greens were long kept for ceremonial pieces rather than everyday adornment, and they were associated with gravity. It is a convention of taste, not a property of the stone. 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.
The jade you patinate by handA row of beads 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.
The polish, and what is read in itThe scholarly tradition associates jade with a soft rather than a sharp gloss, and makes of it an image of restraint. It is an aesthetic reading turned moral, not an observation about the stone.
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.
