Green jade earrings mounted as threader chains: a long post passes through the lobe, the chain follows and lets a round jade bead hang below the ear. The green is pale and translucent, with a small faceted red bead set just above it.
In four lines
Threader chains: the post passes the lobe, the chain follows, the bead hangs.
Two round pierced jade beads, mounted with no setting at all.
Gold tone metal, alloy not stated. Red bead not identified.
No size to choose: there is nothing to measure on an earring.
Two stones are never the same green
This is the only family in the catalogue where the stone comes in pairs, and that is what makes it interesting. On a natural material, two beads from the same block will not be strictly identical: one will be a little milkier, the other a little more translucent, and the green will shift by a quarter of a tone. That is not a sorting defect, it is a signature.
The consequence is direct: if your two beads are of a strictly identical green, that deserves a closer look rather than celebration. A perfectly reproducible colour is what a dye produces, not a rock. I claim nothing about this pair, whose treatment status is not determined like that of the whole catalogue. The checks that need no equipment.
The threader chain, and how it is worn
This mounting has neither clasp nor butterfly back. The rigid post enters at the front of the lobe, comes out behind, and you pull it until the chain takes its place; the bead ends up below the ear, the chain hangs behind. You set the length by pulling more or less, which means there is no size to choose, and none to get wrong either.
Two precautions, and they hold for every threader model: nothing locks the chain, so an earring can slide and fall if something pulls on it, a jumper for instance. And the piercing needs to be well healed, since the post is fine but rigid.
A pale green, and what it is worth
These beads are a light green, almost milky, with a little translucency at the edge. On jadeite, that green comes from a low content of chromium; on nephrite, from a low content of iron. The two minerals are unrelated, jadeite is a pyroxene and nephrite an amphibole, and it took a laboratory to separate them: Alexis Damour, in 1863. What tells them apart.
The market overvalues intense green and looks down on pale green. That is a pricing convention, not a hierarchy of material: a pale, translucent jade is no less jade than a dark, opaque one. What makes the price of a jade.
Why I write green jade earrings, and not simply jade earrings
Because the word jade, on its own, says very little. What is sold under that name is very often serpentine, labelled “new jade” or “Korean jade”, or dyed quartzite, sold as “Malaysia jade”. None of those names designates jade.
On a bare stone, the scale settles it: the four reference figures above are separated by far more than the uncertainty of a kitchen scale. On a bead strung on its chain it settles nothing, and this page writes that rather than letting you believe otherwise. I weigh, I do not certify.
Additional information
Stone
Jadéite
Colour
Light green
Stone shape
Round beads
Motif
No motif
Mounting
Chain
Metal
Gold tone, alloy not stated
Setting
Drilled stone
Worn by
Women
Paired stones
Red bead, not identified
Mineral family
Sodium aluminium pyroxene
Hardness (Mohs)
6.5 to 7
Reference density
3.25 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 worn at the ear
What follows changes register, and I flag it rather than blending it into the rest of the page. Nothing here is demonstrated. These are usages and beliefs, old and documented, that I report because they are part of the history of this stone. No piece of jewellery in this shop is sold as a treatment, and I attribute no effect to this one.
The stone that movesAn earring follows the step and the breath. Several traditions have read a meaning into that constant movement; I mention it because it comes up often, without giving it more weight than that.
The ear, a late usageJade was first an object of ritual, of rank and of power, rarely an earring. The jade ear piece is a recent form, carried by modern trade rather than by tradition.
A stone of moral virtueIn Confucian thought, jade is associated with qualities of character rather than with effects on the body: uprightness, constancy, restraint. It is the best documented meaning of all.
Imperial greenThe market calls imperial green a clear, translucent green, and the phrase circulates with no fixed definition: it is neither a standard, nor an official grading, nor a guarantee of anything. I use it on none of my pages.
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.
