Authenticity
Most advice on this question is either useless or slightly dangerous, and it fails in the same way: it treats fake as one thing. It is three things, they need different tests, and the one that costs buyers the most money is the one no home test can catch. Here is what you can establish standing in a shop, what you cannot, and what has to be settled by a laboratory.
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.
| Class | What was done to it | What it is worth |
|---|---|---|
| Type A | Untreated. Cut, polished, and at most waxed on the surface, which is traditional and accepted. | The only category with a durable resale value. |
| Type B | Bleached with acid to strip brown and gray staining, then impregnated with polymer resin to fill the structure the acid opened up. | A fraction of Type A, and the resin ages. |
| Type C | Dyed. Color added to a stone that did not have it. | Costume value. |
| Type B+C | Both: bleached, impregnated and dyed. | Costume value, sold as more. |
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.
Fritsch, Wu, Moses, McClure and Moon, Gems & Gemology, Fall 1992.
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.
Light through the stone
Best single test at home
How: Put a small bright light against the edge and look at where the beam enters.
What a pass proves: Real jade shows an irregular internal texture: fibers in nephrite, a granular mosaic in jadeite. Round bubbles mean glass. Uniform, structureless clarity is suspicious.
Look at the color boundaries
Genuinely useful
How: Find a crack or a drilled hole and look at the color right at it, ideally with a loupe.
What a pass proves: Dye concentrates in fractures and around drill holes, so color that pools along a crack instead of sitting in the body of the stone points to Type C.
Heft
Rules things out, proves nothing
How: Hold it, then hold something of the same size that you know is glass or plastic.
What a pass proves: Jade is dense, roughly three and a third times the weight of water, and it feels wrong in the hand next to an imitation. It will not distinguish jadeite from nephrite or Type A from Type B.
Cold to the touch
Weak
How: Rest it against your cheek or your wrist.
What a pass proves: Stone conducts heat away from skin and warms slowly. Plastic warms almost at once. Glass also stays cold, so this only separates jade from plastic.
The sound
Real but unreliable alone
How: Suspend the bangle on a thread and tap it with another piece of jade or a coin.
What a pass proves: Untreated jade rings with a long clear note; resin-filled material tends to sound duller and shorter. Real, and used in the trade, but it depends on shape, thickness and the ear doing the listening.
Scratching it
Do not do this
How: Do not.
What a pass proves: It damages the piece, and the answer it gives is ambiguous anyway, since jadeite, nephrite, quartzite and hardened glass sit close enough together on the hardness scale to confuse 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.
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.
Gems & Gemology, Summer 2014 lab note.
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.
The single most useful thing you can do without equipment is put a small bright light against the edge and look at the internal texture: real nephrite shows interwoven fibers, real jadeite shows a granular mosaic, and glass shows either nothing or round bubbles. Check drilled holes and cracks for pooled dye. Weigh it in your hand, because jade is dense. None of that separates untreated jade from bleached and resin-filled jade, which is the most common problem in the market and needs a laboratory.
Type A is untreated jadeite: cut, polished, and at most surface-waxed. Type B has been bleached with acid and then impregnated with polymer resin to fill the structure the acid opened up. Type C has been dyed. B+C is both. These are treatment categories rather than quality grades, so a mediocre stone can be Type A and a beautiful one can be Type B. Only Type A holds value over time.
For anything above a modest price, yes, and the certificate needs to be specific. It should name the material (jadeite or nephrite), state whether treatment was detected, and identify the laboratory that issued it. A report that only says "jade" or "natural stone" has told you almost nothing. In Hong Kong, mainland China and the United States there are established gemological laboratories that test jadeite routinely; a seller who will not send a piece to one has answered your question.
Partly. Suspending a bangle and tapping it produces a long clear ring in untreated jade and a duller, shorter sound in resin-impregnated material, and dealers do use it. It is not conclusive on its own: the note depends on thickness, shape and any hairline fracture, and comparing two bangles of different sizes will mislead you. Use it as one signal among several rather than as a verdict.
Materially yes, commercially no. Type B jadeite is genuine jadeite that has been bleached and filled with polymer, so the mineral is real while the appearance is manufactured. The resin is the problem: it is not as durable as the stone around it, and a piece that was sold on its color can change over years in a way untreated jade does not. The honest description is treated jadeite, and a seller who says only "real jade" has answered a different question from the one you asked.
The treatment classes and the limits of each identification method come from the gemological literature listed here, read directly rather than through a summary.