Jade hoop earrings: two small gilt clip hoops, each carrying a tube of water green stone, a green bead and a gilt disc. They sit close against the lobe.
The tube and the bead are not the same tint, and my supplier announces only one word for both. The page does not deduce that they are the same material.
The charms unhook, so the stone can be weighed: the record will be published. Why I write it down.
Jade hoop earrings: two small gilt rings closing with a clip, each carrying three charms, a tube of water green stone, a translucent green bead and a smooth gilt disc. They sit close against the lobe and the charms move at the slightest movement.
In four lines
Two gilt clip hoops, three charms on each.
A tube of water green stone, a green bead, a gilt disc.
Close against the lobe: they do not hang, and they weigh nothing.
The record will be published: the charm unhooks, so it can be weighed.
Two different stones on the same hoop
Look closely at the charms: the tube and the round bead are not the same tint. The tube is water green, a little milky, fairly opaque. The bead is darker and more translucent, with shades of frank green.
It is not a fault of matching, it is the design of the piece: two volumes, two greens, answering each other beside a gilt disc. My supplier announces only one word for both, and I am not going to deduce from that that they are the same material.
The weighing will therefore be on the tube, the larger of the two, and the record will say so. If the two stones really differ, the figure will hold only for that one, and the page will write it.
A clip hoop, and what that is worth day to day
The ring closes with a spring clip, not with a post to push into a butterfly back. In practise: you put them on with one hand, you do not hunt for the hole, and you do not lose a back down the washbasin.
The other advantage is the weight. The charms are small and the ring is hollow: the whole is worn all day without pulling on the lobe, which is not the case for most of the drops in this catalogue.
The other side of the coin is discretion: at this size the piece is seen close up and not from a distance. It is an everyday choice rather than an evening piece. All the earrings in the section.
What the stone is, and what remains to be established
The tube is drilled right through and mounted on a post: it comes off by opening its ring with pliers, with no glue to break. That is what makes the measurement possible, and I will make it on the example I order, never on a piece being sold.
What is sold under the name of jade is very often serpentine, around 2.6, or dyed quartzite, around 2.65, when nephrite starts at 2.90. On a stone of this green the gap is clear and the figure will settle it.
Outside Burma, country of extraction not confirmed
What tradition attributes to 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.
Jade at the earsThe jueshi, slit jade rings worn at the ear, are among the oldest known Chinese ornaments: examples are found in Neolithic burials, long before the discs and the belt pendants.
Wearing little, and for a long timeThe old usage was not to accumulate: a single piece, kept for decades and often handed on, was worth more than a collection. It is a point on which Chinese tradition and contemporary jewellery do not say the same thing.
The water green of scholarly tasteVery pale jades were long preferred to vivid greens in cultivated Chinese taste, where discretion counts more than brilliance. The fashion for intense green is recent, and largely commercial.
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.
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.
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.
