Real jade is never perfectly even in colour. Look for cloudy patches, pale streaks and darker flecks in the stone, because a flawlessly uniform green is the clearest sign of dye. Jade also stays cool against the skin, resists a steel blade, and reads about 2.95 when you weigh it in and out of water. Serpentine, the stone most often sold as jade, is lighter and gives itself away in that last test.
You have a jade ring, or a pendant someone gave you, and you want to know whether the green stone is jade at all.
Almost everything written about jade assumes you are holding a bangle: hang it from a thread, strike it with a coin, judge the weight on your wrist. If your stone is set in silver, none of that helps.
This guide is for a stone that is already in a setting.
I have been cutting stones in my Tbilisi studio since 2019, and jade is one I shape and set myself. A stone behaves differently under the wheel depending on what it is, and you learn that by cutting it. What follows is what I check.
Jadeite and Nephrite: One Word, Two Stones
Jade is not a mineral. It is one name for two different stones, and most arguments about real and fake jade start there.
Nephrite is built from fibres that grow through each other in every direction, the way wool mats into felt. It is the older jade: World History Encyclopedia dates the first use of jade in China to about 6000 BCE, eight thousand years ago, long before anyone there had seen the other one.
Jadeite has a grainy structure instead. It reached China from Burma only about three hundred years ago.
| Nephrite | Jadeite | |
|---|---|---|
| Structure | Fibres matted together | Grains packed together |
| Shine | Soft, waxy | Bright, glassy |
| Light | Usually stops at the surface | Often passes through |
| Hardness | 6 to 6.5 | 6.5 to 7 |
| Water test reading | About 2.95 | About 3.34 |
| Commonly treated | Rarely | Often |
My jade is nephrite, and that carries two advantages.
It is hard to break. Hardness and toughness are not the same thing. Hardness is how well a stone resists scratching. Toughness is how well it resists breaking. Diamond is the hardest material there is and will still split if you strike it wrong. Nephrite is only moderately hard, but those matted fibres make it the toughest gem material there is. GIA scores toughness on a scale where nephrite reaches 225,000 and jadeite 120,000, against 600 for sapphire and ruby. For something you wear every day, that is the property that counts.
It is rarely treated. The bleaching, resin filling and dyeing the jade trade worries about are done mostly to jadeite, which is why jadeite is sold with laboratory certificates. Nephrite goes through far less of that, so the checks below will take you most of the way.
Four Checks You Can Make Without Any Tools
Start here. None of these needs equipment.
1. Uneven colour
Green jade is the colour almost everyone means by jade, and the colour most often faked. Check this first.
Natural nephrite is never one flat green. Paler cloudy areas sit beside darker flecks, a band runs across one side and not the other, and the shade shifts as you turn the stone under a lamp.
Dyed stone does the opposite. The green is even and strong everywhere, and it looks slightly too perfect, the way a printed colour does. Look closely and you can often see the colour gathered along small cracks, because dye soaks into stone the way water soaks into paper.
A flawless, uniform, brilliant green on an inexpensive piece is the most common sign of dye there is.
2. Waxy shine, not glassy
Polished nephrite gives back one broad, soft highlight, a look people call waxy or slightly oily. Glass throws a sharp, bright point instead. Plastic and resin look flat, with no depth under the surface.
3. Cool to the touch
Jade draws heat from your skin, so it feels cold at first and warms slowly. Plastic and resin warm almost at once. This one will not separate jade from glass, which is also cold, but it rules out the cheapest imitations in seconds.
4. Domed, not faceted
Cutting flat faces into a stone bounces light back out of it. That only works when light can get through in the first place, and jade is too dense with colour for that. What you see in jade is the surface and the few millimetres beneath it, and a rounded dome is what shows them.
So jade is cut as a smooth dome and taken to a polish. The dome is cut, not found. No stone leaves the ground that shape. A faceted green stone sold as jade is worth a question.
Three Tests That Need a Tool
Weigh it in water. This is the one that settles it. Weigh the stone dry, then weigh it hanging in a glass of water, and divide the dry weight by the difference between the two. IGS puts nephrite at 2.95 and jadeite at 3.34. Serpentine comes in near 2.6, quartz near 2.65, glass near 2.5. It only works on a loose stone, because a set piece weighs the silver too.
Scratch a hidden edge. Nephrite is 6 to 6.5 on the hardness scale, so a steel blade slides off it. Most serpentine is far softer and marks at once. One kind does not: IGS puts bowenite at 4 to 6, and bowenite is the serpentine most often sold as jade. So a stone that resists the blade is not proven jade, while a stone that marks is ruled out. Do this on the back or the rim, never on the face, and never on a piece you are not willing to mark.
Look through it. Hold a torch against the back of the stone and use a magnifying glass. Nephrite shows a tangled, fibrous texture running through it. Dyed stone shows colour pooled in the cracks and thin everywhere else. Glass shows tiny round bubbles and soft swirls.
Serpentine is the one to watch for. It is sold as jade more often than anything else, sometimes under the name new jade, and it looks convincing. The water test is what settles it, because serpentine is lighter than jade whichever kind it is. I went through the same set of questions for a very different stone in real versus fake obsidian.
Eight Thousand Years of Meaning
Ask what jade means and the answer comes mostly from China, where the stone stood for character rather than for wealth. In the Book of Rites, Confucius lists the qualities he saw in jade. One of them is very close to what this article is about: "Its flaws not concealing its beauty, nor its beauty concealing its flaws". Two thousand years ago, the cloudy patches in a stone were already seen as honesty rather than damage. That tradition is about nephrite.
Nephrite carries a second tradition as well. Maori carvers in New Zealand call it pounamu, and treat it as something given and passed on rather than bought.
What to Look For When You Buy
Three questions cover most of it.
Look at the photograph before you read the description. If the green is the same shade everywhere, ask why.
Ask which stone it is. A seller who cannot tell you whether a piece is nephrite or jadeite probably cannot tell you what else has been done to it.
Ask where it was made. If one workshop shaped the stone and built the setting, there is someone who can answer your questions.
My jade is nephrite, cut and set by hand in my Tbilisi studio, and every stone is chosen one at a time. You can see the pieces in my jade collection.
Common Questions About Jade
Is nephrite real jade?
Yes. Both nephrite and jadeite are sold as jade, and both have been for centuries. Nephrite is the older of the two and the one that every classical Chinese text on jade describes.
Do I need a certificate?
For jadeite, yes. Bleaching, resin and dye are common there, and a laboratory report is how you rule them out. For nephrite it matters much less, which is why the tests above are worth doing yourself.
Should jade be see-through?
Not usually. Nephrite mostly stops light at the surface. People pay more for jadeite you can see through, but an opaque nephrite stone is normal and says nothing about whether it is real.
Can jade get wet?
Yes. Warm water and a little soap are all it needs, then dry it with a soft cloth. Keep it away from bleach and solvents, which attack the polish rather than the stone.
Is jade expensive?
It depends which jade, and on far more than the stone. Rare jadeite reaches auction prices. Nephrite costs far less. That is one reason people have worn it every day for thousands of years instead of keeping it in a case. In a finished piece you are also paying for the cutting and the silver work.
