Yellow jade earrings: a small tube of water green stone veined with white, topped by a bead of translucent honey yellow, the two hung side by side from a gilt clip hoop. The yellow is the colour that gives the model its name.
In four lines
A tube of water green veined with white and a honey yellow bead.
The two side by side on a gilt clip hoop.
The yellow bead is not announced as jade, and the page says so.
The record will be published: the charms unhook, so they can be weighed.
One photograph for several models, and what I did about it
It has to be said, because it is the kind of detail discovered on delivery. My supplier’s listing shows several models in one image, laid side by side as though they formed a pair. They are not pairs, they are variants to choose from.
So I cropped the image to the one model sold here, the green tube and the yellow bead. You will receive two earrings identical to the one in the photograph, not one of each model.
I flag it rather than let the image speak: a product page that shows two different pieces and sells only one is misleading, even unintentionally. All the earrings in the section.
Two stones, and only one is announced as jade
The water green tube is the one my supplier sells under the name of jade. It is veined with white on the diagonal, with a visible gradation from green to milky, and that is exactly the kind of irregularity a natural stone shows.
The yellow bead, for its part, is announced under no name at all. It is translucent, a very clean honey yellow, and it could as easily be an agate, a chalcedony or a resin. The record writes it as not announced, and I will not guess in my supplier’s place.
That is why the weighing will be on the tube and not on the bead: measuring a material nobody names would prove nothing useful.
What the weighing will be able to establish
The tube is drilled right through and mounted on a post with a ring. It comes off by opening the ring with pliers, with no glue to break, and I will do 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. The gap is clear and the figure will settle it.
Outside Burma, country of extraction not confirmed
What tradition attributes to yellow 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.
The colour of the emperorUnder the Ming and the Qing, yellow was a colour reserved for the sovereign, forbidden to common people for clothing and roofs. A yellow jade was therefore nothing trivial, and court pieces carry the mark of it.
Just after whiteIn the hierarchy of the Xinjiang nephrites, honey yellow came second behind mutton fat white. The connoisseurs' treatises of the Qing rank it so, and the prices of old sales confirm it.
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.
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.
