How to tell if jade is real

Before the tests, a warning from the tradition itself, because it is not a flattering one.

The most famous piece of jade in Chinese history was twice pronounced worthless by professionals. A man of Chu named Bian He found an unworked jade matrix in the mountains and brought it to his king, whose court jade expert examined it and said: it is a rock. Bian He lost his left foot for lying. A reign later he tried again, got the same verdict from the same profession, and lost the right one. Only under a third king was the stone cut open, and inside was the jade that became the Heirloom Seal of the Realm. The story is in the Han Feizi, and we tell it in full on the main jade page.

Two thousand years later the equipment is better and the stakes are lower, but the moral holds: confident jade opinions, including confident negative ones, are worth less than they sound. Nobody can look at a stone across a counter and know. The rest of this page is about narrowing the range of things it can be.

When someone asks whether their jade is real, they could be asking any of these, and the answers have nothing to do with each other.

It is not jade at all. Serpentine, dyed quartzite, aventurine, glass and plastic all get sold under the name, usually with a country attached: Malaysia jade, Indian jade, new jade. We list the usual substitutes and what gives each of them away on the types of jade page. This is the easiest problem to catch and the least expensive to get wrong, because the pieces are cheap.

It is jade, and it has been treated. Genuine jadeite, bleached with acid and filled with resin, or dyed, or both. This is the expensive problem. The material is real, it can be beautiful, and no home test settles it.

It is jade, untreated, and it is not the jade you were told. Nephrite sold as jadeite, ordinary jadeite sold as imperial, Russian or Canadian nephrite sold with a Hetian story attached. This is not fakery so much as a description problem, and it is extremely common at the middle of the market.

The single most useful vocabulary in the jadeite trade, and the most widely misunderstood. The letters describe treatment, not quality. A plain, cloudy, unexciting stone can be Type A, and a stone that stops you in the street can be Type B.

The treatment was documented properly in 1992, when a team led by Emmanuel Fritsch published the first full account of it in Gems & Gemology. They describe a two-step process: a brown or gray color component, probably iron compounds sitting in the fractures, is chemically removed, and the resulting whiter material is then impregnated with a polymer. The acid does not add anything. It takes away, and what it takes away leaves the stone structurally emptier than it was, which is what the resin is there to hide.

And here is the sentence in that paper that should govern how you shop. Several gemological tests are useful in detecting the treatment, the authors write, but infrared spectroscopy is the only method found so far that gives conclusive evidence of polymer impregnation in every case.

Infrared spectroscopy is not a thing you do at a market stall. That is the whole reason certificates exist, and the reason the rest of this page is honest about its own limits.

Every test below is real and worth knowing. The column that matters is the third one, because the usual failure is not doing the wrong test. It is doing a valid test and then over-reading the result.

Notice what the whole list has in common. Every one of these can tell you the piece is not jade. Not one of them can tell you the piece has not been bleached and filled. Home testing is a screening tool, and screening tools are good at rejecting and bad at approving.

A report that reads "natural jade stone" is decoration. A useful one is specific, and it answers four questions.

Which mineral. The words jadeite or nephrite, not the word jade. Those are two different stones with two different markets, as the types page sets out.

Whether treatment was detected. Phrased plainly: no indications of treatment, or impregnation detected, or dye detected. This is the sentence you are paying for.

Which laboratory, and traceably. A named gemological laboratory with a report number you can check against its own records. Established laboratories in Hong Kong, mainland China and the United States test jadeite as routine work.

Which object. Weight, measurements, and a photograph, so that the report is attached to the piece in your hand and not to a piece that resembles it.

One practical note that saves arguments. Ask the seller, before money changes hands, whether they will accept a return if an independent laboratory finds treatment. The answer is informative regardless of what it is, and it costs nothing to ask.

A real jade bangle with a certificate is what most buyers now ask for, and the certificate is usually a small laminated card in Chinese, or a one-page report in English, that nobody explains. Here is what each line is doing, and the two places the verdict actually hides.

The parenthesis. On a mainland Chinese certificate the entire verdict is whether anything follows the word for jadeite. China's national naming standard for gemstones, GB/T 16552, sorts every process into two classes: enhancement, the traditional and accepted ones, which do not have to appear in the name at all; and treatment, which must. For jadeite the standard's own table files heat and filling with colorless oil or wax under enhancement, and bleaching-with-filling, dyeing and coating under treatment. A treated stone must be written with the method after the name, or with the single word treated in a parenthesis. So a card that reads jadeite with nothing after it is the standard's way of saying Type A, a card that reads jadeite followed by bleached, filled, or treated, is Type B, and the letters A, B and C are not part of the standard's naming at all. They are Hong Kong trade slang; where they appear on a card, the issuer added them.

One thing the parenthesis cannot tell you is worth knowing. The standard's table lists bleaching alone, without the filling, as an enhancement too. In practice bleached jadeite is nearly always filled, because, as the 1992 paper describes, the acid leaves the stone so hollow that the lowest grades can be crushed by finger pressure, and it is the resin that gets caught. But the rule is what it is, and it is one more reason to prefer a report that names the tests over a card that only names the stone.

The infrared line. On a fuller report the decisive evidence is a spectrum, printed as a graph or summarized in a sentence, and it is worth knowing the numbers because they are what the laboratory is actually reading. Polymer resin in a bleached stone shows a strong absorption near 2,900 wavenumbers, which the 1992 paper resolves into three sharp peaks at about 2,965, 2,930 and 2,875, with a weaker companion at about 3,035; a 2018 Gems & Gemology lab note gives the usual resin markers as 3,061 and 3,040. Wax, the traditional surface finish, shows its own pair at 2,920 and 2,850. A report that says no polymer detected by infrared is telling you the first set of peaks was absent. If the wax bands are mentioned, that is not a treatment finding; the 1992 authors found them on stones presented as untreated and concluded that virtually all jadeite is waxed before it reaches the market.

The 2018 note is the cautionary case. A bangle that fluoresced strongly under ultraviolet turned out on infrared to be heavily impregnated with wax rather than resin, after bleaching. The laboratory classified it as B jade anyway, because the Hong Kong definition covers bleaching followed by impregnation with wax, resin or any other agent, and the note observes that this is exactly how an unsuspecting buyer is led to believe a wax-impregnated stone is Type A. A surface wax finish and a bleached stone soaked in wax are different objects, and only the spectrum, read by someone who knows what a heavy wax band looks like, separates them.

The word feicui. Hong Kong and mainland reports increasingly say fei cui rather than jadeite, and the standard explains why: its table of jade names lists feicui as one basic name covering three minerals, jadeite, omphacite and kosmochlor. That is not evasion. The dark stone the black jade page describes is omphacite, and it is feicui by this definition and not jadeite by a mineralogist's. On a certificate, feicui is the honest word for the material as the trade actually sells it.

The laboratory. The report should name the laboratory, carry a report number, and be checkable against the laboratory's own records, usually by typing the number into its website. Most reports also carry a photograph, a weight and dimensions. A card with a laboratory name and no way to verify the number is a card.

Worth knowing, because it keeps the confidence calibrated in both directions. In 2014 Gems & Gemology reported a jadeite bangle that carried the visual signatures of polymer treatment and turned out, on full testing, not to be treated at all. The appearance had been produced by the stone's own structure.

Which is to say: a piece can look treated and be untouched, and a piece can look flawless and be full of resin. The eye is a screening instrument in both directions, and anyone, including us, who tells you they can settle it by looking is telling you about their confidence rather than about your stone.

We are not a gemological laboratory and we are not an appraisal service. We will not look at a photograph of your bangle and tell you whether it is real, whether it is Type A, or what it is worth, and you should be wary of anyone online who will. Photographs cannot carry the information the question needs, the confident answer is free to give, and the person giving it carries none of the risk of being wrong.

What this site is for is the layer underneath: what these categories mean, where the words came from, and why a stone that people have been grinding for four thousand years is surrounded by this particular kind of confusion. For a formal identification of a specific object, use a laboratory.