Jade drop pendant: a teardrop cabochon, pale grey green, closed set in a silver tone mount chased with scrolls. Wide bail.
The stone shows a fine fibrous shimmer on its surface, characteristic of nephrite. It is a serious clue, and the page presents it as one, not as a proof.
The closed setting forbids weighing: the record will stay empty, and I will not damage the mount for a figure. Why I write it down.
A jade drop pendant: a teardrop cabochon, pale grey green, domed and polished without a facet, closed set in a silver tone mount chased all over with scrolls. The bail is wide and takes a chain as thick as a cord.
In four lines
A teardrop cabochon, domed and polished, with no facet.
Silver tone mount chased with scrolls across its whole width.
Wide bail: it takes a thick chain or a cord.
The record will stay empty: a closed setting forbids weighing.
Why this page will carry no figure
The stone is held by a closed setting, that is a collar of metal folded over the whole rim of the cabochon. It is the surest setting there is, the one that best protects a domed stone, and it is also the one that makes it impossible to remove.
To weigh it you would have to open the collar along its whole length, so deform a chased mount that does not come back into shape cleanly. I am not going to damage a piece of jewellery to get a figure, and I would rather write that limit down than pass over it.
The Mineral line of the record will therefore say what my supplier announces, and nothing more. It is flagged as not established, and it will stay so on this reference. The weighing method, with its three limits.
What the stone shows anyway
A closed setting does not stop you looking. The cabochon is translucent along its edges, where the light passes clearly, and its surface shows a fine parallel shimmer, like fibres lying all in one direction.
That fibrous felting is characteristic of nephrite, whose structure is made of interlocked needles. It is a serious clue, and it deserves to be flagged. It is no less a clue: some fibrous serpentines give a similar look.
The green is pale and a little grey, without the saturation of dyed stones. A muted colour is rather reassuring: dyeing goes after brilliance, not after discretion. The checks that need no equipment.
A mount that is half the piece
The mount is not a simple frame: it is chased with openwork scrolls across its whole width, and it takes up almost as much room as the stone. That is a deliberate choice, and it has a direct consequence for upkeep.
The metal is silver tone, not hallmarked by my supplier. So I write it that way, and not 925: a hallmark is information, and I do not invent it. A silver tone metal eventually takes a patina, above all in the hollows of the chasing where a cloth does not reach.
Jade, for its part, fears none of that. Clean the stone with lukewarm water and a soft cloth, and let the mount age: a patina at the bottom of the scrolls is not a flaw, it is what gives relief to chased work. How to clean a jade stone, and all the pendants in the shop.
Additional information
Stone
Jadeite or nephrite, not resolved
Colour
Light green
Stone shape
Drop
Motif
No motif
Mounting
Metal setting
Metal
Silver 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 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 cabochon, an old cutDoming and polishing a stone without faceting it is the oldest way of cutting one, and the only one that suits jade: its fibrous structure makes sharp edges pointless, since it does not return light the way a transparent crystal does.
The drop and the rainThe teardrop shape has no reading of its own in the Chinese tradition of jade, where it is the carved motifs that carry meaning. It is a jewellery shape, found the world over, and there is nothing more to say about it.
The muted green of old tastePale and greyed greens were long preferred by Chinese scholars, for whom the restraint of a stone was worth more than its brilliance. The present taste for saturated greens comes from the jadeite trade, and it is recent.
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.
Dispatch within 48 hours of your order being confirmed, for delivery within 14 days from dispatch. I keep no stock in reserve, and I will not promise a date I could not meet.
Shipping Costs
€6.99 whatever the destination, free on orders over €47 to France, Belgium, Switzerland and Luxembourg. The exact amount is shown in your basket before you pay.
The Packaging, and Why It Matters
Every piece travels in its own pouch, kept apart from the others. This is not a question of presentation: the hardness of jade is unremarkable, between 6 and 6.5 for nephrite and 6.5 to 7 for jadeite, and the quartz in ordinary household dust sits at 7. Two pieces of jewellery that travel together arrive marked.
Fourteen Days to Change Your Mind
No need to give a reason. An email is enough to open a return; there is no form to fill in. Return postage is at your expense, unless the piece does not match its listing or arrives damaged.
Lukewarm water, mild soap, a soft cloth. A very soft brush for the hollows of a carving. That is all, and it is enough.
What You Must Never Do, and Why
No ultrasonic cleaners, no steam, no solvents, no heat source. This is not a precaution for show: the treatment status of my pieces is undetermined. My supplier does not know it, and weighing identifies the mineral without telling me anything about a possible resin impregnation. Resin withstands 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 difficult to break: its structure of interlocking crystals resists cracking, and that is what made it usable for axe heads in the Neolithic. Its hardness, by contrast, is unremarkable, 6 to 6.5 for nephrite and 6.5 to 7 for jadeite. The quartz in ordinary household dust sits at 7: that is what dulls a 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 knocks against hard edges are common. 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. French, from Morbihan, living in Tallinn. I choose the pieces and have them mounted: I mine nothing, I cut nothing, and the metalwork is not done by my hand. What I bring is the selection, and with this material that is what decides everything.
I am not a gemmologist, not a lapidary, not a therapist, and I do not claim to be.
I Weigh, I Do Not Certify
Before a listing goes online, I order one example of it for myself. When it reaches me unmounted, 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 listing, and not every piece. I do not handle the piece that is sent to you, and I would rather write that down than let you believe otherwise. The method, with its three limits.
What I Cannot Know
The treatment status of my pieces. My supplier does not know it, and the scales do not tell me: they identify the mineral, not the resin impregnation. Only infrared spectroscopy in a laboratory would settle it, and I do not have that done. So you will never read “Grade A jadeite”, “Type A” or “untreated” on this site. The information sheet.
Where My Jade Comes From
No Burmese jadeite, and the first reason is legal. Not the one you read everywhere: the JADE Act of 2008 did 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 company that controls the Burmese gem trade. So there is no blanket ban, but a US person is not allowed to trade with that entity, and a stone never tells you where it has been. A single supply chain serves ten markets, so it has to hold up in the most demanding of them. When an origin is not confirmed to me in writing, the listing does not state it. My origin charter.
