Jade heart pendant: a green stone cut as a heart, held in an openwork gold tone mount of scrolls, with a Chinese character in applique across the middle of the face.
I do not translate the character: my supplier does not name it. On a heart the guess would be easy, and that is precisely why I do not make it.
Sold under reserve on the stone: the green stays as deep at the edge as at the centre, which is the behaviour of a surface colour. Why I write it down.
A jade heart pendant: a green stone cut as a heart, held in an openwork gold tone mount of scrolls, with a Chinese character laid in applique across the middle of the face. The bail is wide and flat, and the chain is fine.
In four lines
A green stone cut as a heart, held in an openwork mount.
A Chinese character in gold tone applique across the middle of the face.
Sold under reserve: the colour is that of dyed quartzite.
The record will stay empty if the stone does not come out without forcing.
A colour that has to be looked at squarely
The green is bright, dense, and it does not weaken at the edges of the heart where the stone nevertheless thins. That is the detail that counts: a stone coloured through its mass lightens as it becomes thin, because there is less material to cross.
When the tint stays as deep at the edge as at the centre, it is often because the colour is concentrated in a surface film, which is what a bath of colourant gives on a granular rock. Dyed quartzite behaves exactly that way, and it circulates by the tonne under the name jade.
I am not saying it is certain, and the openwork mount in any case shows only part of the stone. I am saying that is what my supplier’s photograph shows, and that a shop selling one stone has no right to keep quiet about it. The names that do not denote jade.
A character I will not translate
The middle of the face carries a Chinese character, cut out of the metal and laid in applique on the stone. It is drawn in a thick, stylised hand, the kind used for decorative objects rather than for writing.
On a heart the guess would be easy to make, and many shops would make it without hesitating. I am not going to sell a probability as a certainty: my supplier does not name it, and the record writes it as not identified.
The close up photograph in the gallery shows the whole stroke. If you read Chinese you will settle it better than I can, and that is perfectly fine.
A mount that wraps, and what that costs
The mount does not border the heart, it takes it on both faces: openwork scrolls run from the edge towards the centre and hold the stone like an open hand. It is solid, and it is why the piece does not fear a knock.
The price of that solidity is that the stone does not come out easily. On the example I order I will try without forcing; if nothing gives, the record will stay empty and it will say so. The method, with its three limits.
The metal is gold tone, not hallmarked by my supplier. So I write it as gold tone, and not gold plated: a plating is a thickness, so a figure, and I do not invent it. How to clean a jade stone, and all the pendants in the shop.
Additional information
Stone
Jadeite or nephrite, not resolved
Colour
Bright green
Stone shape
Heart
Motif
Chinese character
Mounting
Metal setting
Metal
Gold tone, alloy not stated
Setting
Bezel set
Worn by
Women
Mineral family
Calcic amphibole, Sodium aluminium pyroxene
Hardness (Mohs)
6 to 7
Reference density
2.90 to 3.36 g/cm³
Toughness
Exceptional, interlocking crystals
Treatment
Not determined
Origin
Outside Burma, country of extraction not confirmed
What tradition attributes to the heart and 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.
The heart is WesternThe two lobed silhouette with a point belongs to no Chinese iconography, where feeling is said with a character and not with a shape. It comes from medieval Europe, and it reached Asia with the jewellery trade of the twentieth century.
A word rather than an imageChinese tradition writes its wishes: an engraved or applied character says what a shape does not. That is why so many jade plaques carry a word at the centre, and it is the properly Chinese part of this jewel.
Giving a stoneIn ancient Chinese usage, jades were given to seal an agreement or mark an alliance, between families as much as between people. The object stood for a commitment, and its quality said how serious the giver was.
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.
