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.
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.
