One of the first things the jewelry designer Bliss Lau did after giving birth to her daughter, Soa, in 2018 was make her a black jade bracelet.
“There are heirlooms and then there’s jade,” Ms. Lau, who was raised in Honolulu in a family influenced by her father’s Chinese ancestry, said on a video call from her showroom in Brooklyn.
“Jade lives a life with you,” she added. “If you ask pretty much any Chinese family, they’re going to say, ‘I remember when my auntie fell down that stairwell, and she stood up and nothing was wrong with her, but her jade bracelet broke.’ It was the protection.
“It is this beautiful symbol of life and wisdom and it’s different than any other stone in existence.”
Ms. Lau is not alone in her devotion to jade, nor in her conviction that it stands apart in the gem world. Revered as “the stone of heaven” in China, where prized specimens can be costlier than diamonds, jade lately has gained a following among designers in the West. They are helping to transform its reputation as a sought-after yet very traditional gem — typically carved into bangles and disc pendants redolent of Chinese culture — into one of the jewelry trade’s trendiest stones.
“It’s the material I’m most excited about,” Sarah Ysabel Narici, the designer and founder of Dyne, said from her home studio in Manhattan, where she incorporates antique pieces of mottled green jade into earrings and rings that embody what she called her “futuristic archaic” design philosophy.
“I was raised with the story of my great-grandfather, who lived in Singapore and was a big collector of jade in clocks — I was always drawn to it,” Ms. Narici said. “The versatility and colors and fact that it has this almost oily sheen is really appealing.”
For many prospective buyers, however, jade’s myriad quality points can be confounding. Evaluated on its color, transparency and texture, the material comes in two forms, jadeite and nephrite.
Jadeite is the name for a kind of pyroxene rock that some in the gemological community insist should be called by its traditional Chinese name, fei cui. It is mined in Central America and Myanmar, the source of the world’s most valuable specimens, including the prized variety known as “imperial jade” because, in China, only the emperor could own that specific shade of green. Jadeite, or fei cui, is found in a rainbow of hues, including green, lilac, pink, brown, red, blue, black, orange and yellow.
Nephrite, an aggregate rock made mostly of tremolite with a bit of actinolite, is more common. It is found in many locations, including the United States, Australia, Canada, Russia and New Zealand, and ranges in color from olive green to cream. The best quality, called “mutton fat,” is near white.
Both are tough, fine-grained rocks that lend themselves to carving.
A Fresh Supply
Earlier this month in Tucson, Ariz., during the annual gem shows in that Sonoran Desert city, the buzz among jade lovers centered on a fresh supply of translucent jadeite, or fei cui, from an ancient deposit in Guatemala — much of it blue-green, but some virtually indistinguishable from the imperial jade of Myanmar, said Richard W. Hughes, a co-owner of Lotus Gemology in Bangkok, and a co-author of three books on jade.
At his booth at the Tucson Gem Show on 22nd Street, Luke A. Miller, the owner of Yax Tun Minerals, a dealer in Chiapas, Mexico, that specializes in Guatemalan jade, took a strand of blue-green beads from around his neck and held it to the light. The beads, which were graduated in size, featured dark blue-green gems interspersed with lighter ones.
“This is a color we call ‘sapphire blue,’” Mr. Miller said, referring to the darker beads, which looked translucent against the light. “The folks down there call the lighter color ‘celestial blue,’ or ‘celeste.’”
Mined in the Motagua River Valley of Guatemala by the Olmecs and Maya people as early as 1,800 B.C., the jade’s unusual hues seem to appeal to buyers. “People are starting to really appreciate the darker undertones of Guatemalan jade, instead of the typical bright flashy purple or green they’re getting in Burma,” Mr. Miller said, using the former name for Myanmar.
Andy Lifschutz, an American designer who recently relocated to Paris from Los Angeles, is among them. As he shopped the gem shows adorned in pendants and bead bracelets featuring various colors of jade, he praised the blue hues of the Guatemalan material, which he began buying in 2023 and used last year to make a pair of Cobra Bolla huggie earrings in 18-karat gold, accented with diamonds.
“I slow-rolled-out my production last year, thinking that ’25 would be the year that enough momentum would form behind the Guatemalan material specifically,” Mr. Lifschutz, whose brand is called Andy Lif Jewelry, wrote in a follow-up text.
The jade of the ancient Maya has one distinct advantage over material from Myanmar: It is not subject to sanctions by the U.S. government. Following a military coup in Myanmar in February 2021, the U.S. Treasury Department placed several entities related to Myanmar’s mining ministry, including the state-owned Myanma Gems Enterprise, on a Specially Designated Nationals list, barring American companies from trading with them in an effort to stem the flow of money to the junta.
“There was an exception made for material brought in before the law was passed,” said Sara Yood, the chief executive and general counsel at the Jewelers Vigilance Committee in New York City.
At Mason-Kay, a company in Centennial, Colo., that has traded in fine jade since 1976, the sanctions forced a change in buying practices. “Most of our buying is the Guatemalan material or through secondhand resources, such as estate sales,” said Jeff Mason, the co-owner, who was in the company’s booth at the American Gem Trade Association GemFair this month in Tucson.
To many designers, however, origin — be it Myanmar, Guatemala, Siberia, British Columbia or Wyoming — has little to do with jade’s appeal. “For me, it’s more of what my eye is drawn to from a tone and color standpoint,” the designer Jade Ruzzo said from her home in New York’s Hudson Valley. “I love green jade and not just because it’s my name. It lends itself to my aesthetic because of its earthiness.”
For the collection she plans to release in June, Ms. Ruzzo said she is using eight large pieces of apple-green antique jade in a one-of-a-kind necklace, pairing them with various colors of green and blue-green tourmaline.
The Brazilian designer Fernando Jorge also has embraced jade, specifically green nephrite from British Columbia, in a collection called Bold Stream that he presented publicly in January, when the New York luxury retailer Bergdorf Goodman featured it in its central jewelry showcase.
“The nephrite jade really suits my aesthetic,” Mr. Jorge said recently from his new showroom in New York. “My designs reference nature in a really subtle way and the green reinforces what the work is about. It’s very flattering when you see it on different skin types.”
After the Bergdorf’s showcase, Mr. Jorge took his jade designs on the road to events in Palm Beach, Fla., and St. Moritz, Switzerland. “Jade is one of my pillars,” he said. “I use it when I want to come back to my safe space, to my natural ingredients.”
Deco Echo
A century ago, during the Art Deco era, jade featured prominently in designs by the French jewelry houses — including Cartier and Van Cleef & Arpels — whose jewels often combined carved green jade with white diamonds and black enamel or onyx. During a recent video interview, Pierre Rainero, Cartier’s image, style and heritage director, referred to a necklace composed of 27 imperial jadeite beads made in 1933 for the heiress Barbara Hutton.
“It’s one of the most important gem necklaces ever made,” Mr. Rainero said. “Some exceptional green jade could be compared to the most exceptional emeralds. The Chinese would say it’s the other way around — that some emeralds could be compared to jade — but there’s a kind of magic because the eyes are lured by the effect of the material. It’s totally exceptional.”
Catherine Rénier, Van Cleef’s global chief executive and president, said the house also designed with jade in the 1960s and ’70s, and that the gem reflected “Van Cleef & Arpels’ attachment to the elsewhere as an enduring source of inspiration,” she wrote in an email.
In November, the house presented an ode to a fictional elsewhere with an elaborate collection of high jewelry called “Treasure Island,” after the Robert Louis Stevenson novel. It featured “a transformable long necklace dubbed Lanternes Mystérieuse, adorned with an exceptional set of 31 jadeite beads distinguished by their soft and powdery purple hue,” Ms. Rénier wrote. “All the beads are endowed with a homogenous color, making this set extremely rare.”
Imperial jadeite is so central to the creations of the British high jeweler Asprey that the company’s website features a navigation tab dedicated to the gem. In January, the company introduced new imperial jade designs inspired by Talli ribbons, a traditional craft from Sharjah, one of the United Arab Emirates, that involves weaving fabric and metal together by hand.
The high-end jeweler James de Givenchy, whose Taffin collection is known for combining commonplace materials, such as ceramic, with extremely fine gemstones, said one of jade’s biggest selling points was its durability.
“You can carve a bangle out of it and it will survive everyday wear,” Mr. de Givenchy said from his showroom in Miami. “Imagine if you did a bangle in sapphire or diamond — it would shatter in no time. Jade can really take a beating.”
And yet, even a material used by prehistoric people to fashion weapons breaks on occasion. Ms. Lau — who in November introduced a collection called As We Are, set with Guatemalan jade purchased from Yax Tun Minerals — recently took a class in kintsugi, a Japanese mending technique, to repair her daughter’s black jade bracelet after it was damaged in a fall.
“Any other stone, when it breaks, it’s goodbye, right?” Ms. Lau said. “When jade breaks, it doesn’t lose its beauty. You repair it and you remake it. It’s a symbol of longevity — and regeneration.”
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