Women’s jade bracelet, a light green jadeite bangle
72,90 €
Women’s jade bracelet that is in fact a closed bangle: carved from a single piece, with no hinge and no clasp, round in section and wide. White and green mixed, in patches and streaks.
It is sized by inner diameter, not wrist size: it has to pass your closed hand, thumb tucked in. Measure before you order, it does not open and cannot be resized.
The pattern does not repeat: the piece you receive will not look exactly like the photograph. Bare stone, therefore weighable. Treatment status undetermined.
A women’s jade bracelet that is in fact a closed bangle: carved from a single piece, with no hinge and no clasp, round in section and wide. The jadeite here is white and green at once, the green advancing in patches and streaks across a milky ground.
In four lines
This is a bangle, not a flexible bracelet: it does not open and it does not stretch.
Sized by inner diameter, measured across your closed hand.
White and green mixed: no two examples ever look alike.
Bare stone, therefore weighable: the figure will be published here, with its date.
This Is a Bangle, and That Has to Be Said Before Anything Else
The word bracelet covers two objects that have nothing in common: the strand of beads on elastic, which goes on without a thought, and the bangle carved from a single piece, which does not open, does not close and cannot be resized. This one is a bangle, and it is the only piece in the catalogue where a wrong measurement cannot be put right by anything.
So it is not your wrist you need to measure, it is what your hand needs to pass. Close your hand, tuck your thumb as deep into your palm as it will go, measure around the widest point, and divide by 3.14: that gives you the minimum inner diameter. Add one or two millimetres, because a bangle that only just goes on will go on once, cold, and will not go back on during a heat wave. The method in detail, and the size guide.
White and Green at Once
This piece does not have one colour, it has two: a milky white ground, and green spreading across it in patches, clouds and streaks, denser on one side than the other. The Chinese market has a name for that pattern, and it seeks it out.
What interests me here is simpler: that pattern does not repeat. Two bangles cut from the same block will not carry the same map, and the piece you receive will not look exactly like the photograph. I say so before the purchase rather than after, because it is true of any natural material and because it is precisely what sets it apart from a uniformly coloured paste. The colours of jade.
Jadeite, and What That Word Changes
This piece is listed as jadeite, a sodium-aluminum pyroxene. It is one of the two minerals the word jade covers, the other being nephrite, an amphibole. A Frenchman separated them: in 1863, Alexis Damour established that they are two unrelated species. What sets them apart.
Jadeite’s green comes from chromium and rings clearer than nephrite’s, which comes from iron and pulls toward spinach. And what lets a ring of this width hold without splitting is not its hardness but its toughness: a structure of interlocking crystals that stops a crack from spreading. The difference between hardness and toughness.
Wearing It, and What Actually Damages It
Once in place, a bangle sits snug and barely turns. If it turns a lot, it is too big and it will knock against tables and door handles. An impact does not scratch it: it chips an edge. What wears it day to day is the quartz in everyday dust, which rates 7 on the Mohs scale against 6.5 to 7 for jadeite, and which dulls the curve over time.
Lukewarm water, mild soap, a soft cloth, and a pouch it has to itself. Never an ultrasonic cleaner, never steam, never solvents: since the treatment status is unknown, any resin there might be would not survive them. Care in detail.
Additional information
Stone
Jadéite
Colour
Two tone
Stone shape
Solid bangle
Motif
No motif
Mounting
Rigid bangle
Metal
None
Setting
No setting
Worn by
Women
Paired stones
None, jade only
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 Attaches to the Jade Bangle
What follows changes register, and I flag it rather than blend it into the rest of the listing. None of it is proven. These are customs and beliefs, old and documented, that I report because they are part of this stone's history. No piece in this shop is sold as a remedy, and I claim no effect for this one.
The left wristSeveral Chinese traditions link wearing the bangle on the left wrist to the idea of receiving rather than giving. The custom is widespread; no basis for it is known beyond the custom itself.
Never taking it offA bangle goes on once and stays on, sometimes for a lifetime. The closed shape has much to do with it: this is not a piece of jewellery you choose in the morning, it is an object you wear.
The pattern of white and greenThe Chinese market names and seeks out the jadeites where green floats in clouds over a pale ground. It is a market taste, old and documented, not a mineralogical quality.
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.
The wrong size is the main reason for a return in this category, and jade cannot be resized the way a solid metal band can. Two minutes of measuring almost always prevents it. The size guide.
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.
