Jade bar earrings: a rectangular bar of olive green stone, drilled lengthwise and hung from a small gilt clip hoop. The stone is plainly polished, with no facet and no engraving, and it carries clearly visible dark speckling.
In four lines
A rectangular olive green bar, drilled lengthwise.
Dark speckling in the mass, which I do not hide.
A small gilt clip hoop: it goes on with one hand.
The record will be published: the bar unhooks, so it can be weighed.
The speckling is good news
The stone carries dark points and small streaks, clearly visible in the gallery photographs. I have neither retouched them nor framed them out, and I am not going to apologise for them: on a nephrite these inclusions are common and they plead in favour of the stone.
They are grains of another mineral trapped during the formation of the rock, most often an oxide of chromium or iron. A glass paste has none, and a dyed quartzite would have drowned them under the colour: a perfectly clean tint is more suspect than a broken one.
That does not make a proof, and the page will never say so. It is one more sign, to set beside the figure when it arrives. How to judge the quality of a jade.
An olive green, and why it deserves a word
The tone is dull, between khaki and matt bottle green, far from the brilliant greens of the section. It is a colour that wears very well day to day, and it is also the type tint of serpentine, the stone that circulates more than any other under the name of jade.
I say it here rather than let it be guessed. Fortunately the gap in density is wide: serpentine runs around 2.6, nephrite starts at 2.90. It is the kind of case the weighing settles without discussion.
And it is possible, since the bar unhooks from its ring. The figure will be published in the record, with its date. What separates the two minerals.
A shape that is worn by men too
A straight bar, with no flower, no bead and no carved subject: it is one of the few pairs in this section that can be given without regard to the gender of whoever will wear it. The hoop is small and the bar short, so the whole stays discreet.
The spring clip goes on with one hand, without hunting for the hole, and leaves no back to lose. The weight is negligible: the stone is small and the ring is hollow.
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.
A man's stone, and for a long timeJade is nothing like a feminine ornament in ancient China: belt plaques, archers' thumb rings and rank pendants were men's objects. The present division is recent, and largely Western.
What you do not seeIn scholarly taste a jade without decoration was worth more than an ornamented one: the quality of the material had to be enough. The plainest pieces were often the dearest, and a bare object leaves nothing to hide behind.
The flaw that signsChinese connoisseurs did not look for the stone without a blemish: a well placed inclusion proved the material and gave the object its character. The demand for uniformity is an import from the diamond market.
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.
