What is jade? The jade stone explained

Jade is the name for two different stones, jadeite and nephrite. Both are tough rocks made of tiny interlocking crystals, and both are cut into the bangles, beads, pendants and rings people know as jade jewelry.

Few of our customers ask "What is jade?" outright. They ask "Is this real jade?", and behind the question there is usually a mix-up about the name: that jade is one green stone, that nephrite is a lesser kind of jade, or that jade means only Hetian jade. Each of these comes from a single name being stretched over two stones.

What does the word jade mean?

The word jade names a gemstone, and it comes from a Spanish phrase, piedra de la ijada, "stone of the flank." Spanish writers of the 1560s gave that name to green stones brought from Mexico and Central America, which were believed to cure pain in the side and the kidneys. French turned l'éjade into le jade by splitting the word in the wrong place, and English took jade from French in the early 1700s. Nephrite carries the same old remedy in its name: lapis nephriticus, "kidney stone," is the Latin version of the Spanish phrase.

The name came long before anyone knew what the stone was made of. For the next three centuries Europeans used jade for this whole family of tough carving stones, whether a piece came from the Americas or from China. In 1863 the French mineralogist Alexis Damour analyzed jade carvings brought to Paris from China and found that one of them was made of a mineral nobody had described; he named it jadeite. The traditional Chinese carving stone already had a name, nephrite, given to it in 1780. Neither scientific name pushed out the old word, and that is why jade still covers two stones.

A dictionary today gives jade four common senses:

• the gemstone, meaning jadeite or nephrite
• an object carved from either stone
• jade green, the color named after the stone
• a worn-out horse, from an unrelated older English word that also gave us "jaded"

Chinese has its own word, yu (玉), which is both older and broader than jade, and what it stands for, from virtue to peace and long life, is the subject of jade meaning and symbolism. Jade working in China goes back about 9,000 years, to carved pieces found at Xiaonanshan in Heilongjiang, and the Shuowen Jiezi, a dictionary compiled around 100 AD, defined yu as "the beautiful among stones." For about 3,000 years, since the Zhou dynasty, jade has also stood for a person's moral character in China.

Hard jade and soft jade

Jadeite and nephrite are often called hard jade and soft jade (yingyu and ruanyu in Chinese), and those two names lead many new buyers to think nephrite is a lesser or half-real jade. The names record a small difference in hardness, 6.5 to 7 against 6 to 6.5 on the Mohs scale, not a difference in grade. Nephrite still scratches glass, and it is the tougher of the two, so it chips less easily, as our guide to nephrite jade explains. China's national standard for gem names, GB/T 16552-2017, lists both as natural jade and ranks neither above the other, and Hetian jade, the name many buyers know best, is nephrite. The way we explain it to customers: rice and wheat are both real grains, and jadeite and nephrite are both real jade.

Jade facts: jadeite and nephrite side by side

Jade facts come in pairs, because jadeite and nephrite are made of different minerals, with different chemistry, density and range of color.

Jadeite, covered in depth in our guide to jadeite and Burmese jade, is by far the rarer of the two. Most gem-quality jadeite comes from a single district, Hpakant in northern Myanmar, which is why fine jadeite is sold as Burmese jade, while nephrite is mined on several continents; where jade is found maps the deposits country by country. That concentrated supply is a big part of why fine jadeite costs so much, though fine nephrite can still cost more than ordinary jadeite. In the Chinese trade, jadeite is feicui, and the nephrite valued most is sold as Hetian jade, a name for the material rather than the mine.

A few other stones sit at the edge of the name, and Chinese yu reaches further than the English word, taking in serpentine, Dushan stone and other carving stones that are sorted out in the types of Chinese jade. GIA, the Gemological Institute of America, accepts one more mineral as jade under certain conditions: green omphacite, a close relative of jadeite, when its color and properties match fine jadeite. Maw sit sit, a dark green rock rich in the mineral kosmochlor, comes from the same part of Myanmar and is sometimes sold as kosmochlor jade, but it is a different material.

Is jade a gemstone or a precious stone?

Jade is a gemstone. Jadeite and nephrite are both gem materials, cut and polished for their beauty and their ability to last, and gemologists use jade as the umbrella name for the two. A gem does not have to be a single crystal: opal and lapis lazuli are gems too, and neither is one.

Is jade a precious stone?

Jade counts as semi-precious in the old Western system, which kept the word precious for four stones: diamond, ruby, sapphire and emerald. The split is a trade habit rather than a measure of worth, and many in the gem trade now avoid it: the top grade of jadeite, a "semi-precious" stone by that system, is one of the most expensive gems sold anywhere. Emerald is the precious stone jade gets compared with most often, and we set the two side by side in jade vs emerald.

China ranked stones the other way round. "Gold has a price, jade is priceless" (黄金有价玉无价) is still a common saying, and China's emperors had their seals of state carved from jade.

What is the most valuable jade?

The most valuable jade is imperial jade: jadeite in an intense, even emerald green that is almost transparent. Imperial jade often gets confused with the icy and apple-green jadeite sold beside it, and imperial vs icy vs apple green jade shows how to tell them apart. Below that top grade, value falls with each step down in color, translucency and texture, the factors explained in the last section of this guide.

Is jade a rock, a mineral or a crystal?

Jade is a rock: every piece is a dense mass of microscopic crystals, nearly all of one mineral family, locked together rather than grown as one crystal. Under a microscope the two jades are built differently. Jadeite is a mosaic of tiny grains packed edge to edge. Nephrite is a mat of fine fibers woven through each other like felt.

The structure answers the four questions people ask about what kind of thing jade is:

• Rock: yes. Geologists class jade as a rock, and they call jadeite rock jadeitite.
• Mineral: not quite. Jadeite is the name of a mineral as well as the gem, which is why jade is easy to mistake for a mineral, but nephrite is a rock of tremolite and actinolite, two minerals of the amphibole family.
• Crystal: not a single crystal. A quartz point grew as one crystal; a jade bead is thousands of crystals grown together. Crystal shops still sell jade as a "crystal" in the looser sense of a stone used in crystal practice, and those beliefs are covered in jade benefits.
• Quartz: no. Quartz is silicon dioxide, a different mineral, though quartzite dyed green is one of the most common imitations sold as jade.

The interlocked structure also explains jade's best-known property, toughness out of proportion to its hardness. Jade is no harder than quartz, so grit and sand can scratch it, but a crack that starts in jade has to work its way around grain after grain or fiber after fiber, and few gems, diamond included, resist breaking as well. Carvers rely on that when they thin a piece down to fine openwork, and it is why a solid jade bracelet carved from one piece of stone can be worn every day for years.

What does jade look like?

Jade looks smooth and softly lustrous once polished, ranging from opaque to nearly see-through, but rough jade looks almost nothing like the finished stone.

Jadeite rough is usually wrapped in a weathered skin, brown, yellow or gray, that hides the color inside. Sellers grind a small polished window through the skin so buyers can see a patch of the jade, but the window shows only that patch, which is why buying jadeite rough is a gamble. Nephrite comes both as river pebbles with a thin skin and as mountain material broken from the rock with little or none. Our guide to identifying raw jade covers what else buyers look at and which rocks get mistaken for jade.

Polished jade has a soft, deep shine rather than the sparkle of a faceted gem, because it is shaped into cabochons, beads, bangles and carvings instead of being cut with facets. A cabochon, the domed stone set in a jade ring, shows that shine well. Jadeite polishes to a glassy luster; nephrite has a softer, oily glow. Hold a carved pendant from a jadeite necklace up to a window, and fine material seems to glow from inside. The jade trade calls that translucency water: the more light passes through a piece, the more water it has.

Jade comes in green, white, lavender, yellow, red-orange, gray and black, and our guide to jade colors and their meanings covers what each color means and how it moves value. A single piece of jadeite can carry several colors at once. The most prized colors differ by stone: imperial green in jadeite, and in nephrite a fine, even white known in China as mutton-fat jade.

Other questions about the jade stone

What is jade used for?

Jade is used today mainly for jewelry and carvings, from solid bangles and bead strands to the small cabochons in jade earrings. A jade carving is any object shaped from jade, from a small pendant to a large ornament. Metal tools barely cut jade, so carvers grind it with abrasives, today mostly diamond tools, and our comparison of hand carved vs machine carved jade explains what each method leaves behind. Neolithic people in China and Europe made jade into ornaments and ritual objects, and into axes and knives, because it was so hard to break.

How is jade formed?

Jade forms deep underground in conditions few rocks go through. Jadeite crystallizes at high pressure and fairly low temperature, mostly where one tectonic plate sinks beneath another, and nephrite forms where hot fluids alter serpentinite or dolomite marble. Our guide to how jade is formed follows each process step by step. Both settings are rare, which is why jade deposits are so few.

Is jade valuable?

Jade can be inexpensive or among the most valuable gem material sold, depending on which jade it is and its grade. Our jade price guide gives figures by grade, and our guide to why jade is so expensive explains what drives the top of the market. Most nephrite and commercial-grade jadeite are modestly priced, and price climbs steeply with color, translucency and texture.

Does jade break easily?

Jade does not break easily, but it is not unbreakable. Its toughness stops everyday knocks from turning into cracks, yet a jade bangle dropped on tile or struck against stone can still crack or snap, and our guide to what happens when jade breaks covers what to do next and what the folklore says it means. More than half the broken bangles our customers tell us about fell while being put on or taken off.

Is jade a birthstone?

Jade is not on the modern birthstone list, though some so-called mystical lists give it to March. Our article on whether jade is a birthstone explains how thin the history behind those lists is and where jade fits in Chinese zodiac traditions.

How can you tell good jade from bad?

Good jade is judged on color, translucency, texture, clarity and cracks, and before any of those it has to be natural.

What does good jade look like?

Good jade has strong, even color, as much translucency as its type allows, a fine texture and no cracks. Color counts most in jadeite. Nephrite is judged more on how fine and dense it is than on how much light passes through.

Two distinctions in that table confuse buyers. Clarity and translucency are separate: a piece can let plenty of light through and still be full of flecks. And a crack is not the same as a stone line. A crack is a break in the stone, open at the surface or hidden inside, that weakens the piece; a stone line is a natural seam that healed closed and is usually less serious, though its length, depth and position still matter, and the name a seller gives a line doesn't prove which it is. A flashlight shows both as lines inside the stone, and telling them apart takes magnification and experience, so ask for close, backlit photos before you buy. We send them for any piece on request.

What does pure jade mean?

Pure jade is not a grade on any lab report. Buyers who ask for pure jade usually mean one of three things: real jade rather than an imitation, natural jade with no bleaching, polymer or dye, or fine jade with clean, even color and no cracks. A lab report settles the first two. The third is judged on the piece itself, with the factors in the table above, which is why a natural stone can still be ordinary jade.

Natural or treated?

Natural jade is jadeite or nephrite whose color and structure come from the ground, not from acid, polymer or dye. For jadeite, the trade sorts treatment into three letters:

• Type A jadeite has had no bleaching, polymer or dye. It is finished with a thin polishing wax, a standard last step for jade that wears off with regular wear.
• Type B jadeite has been bleached with acid and then filled with polymer or wax, forced deep into the stone, to hide the damage.
• Type C jadeite has been dyed, and a piece that is both filled and dyed is called Type B+C.

Nephrite can be dyed or filled too, but the trade has no letter grades for it. Glass and serpentine sold as jade are imitations rather than treated jade, and both problems are explained in Type A, B and C jade. Checks at home can raise or lower your suspicion, as our guide on how to tell if jade is real shows, but only a gem lab can confirm that jadeite is Type A, and what a jade lab certificate proves explains how to read the report.

I have bought jadeite rough at Hpakant since 2016 and have it cut and polished in Kunming, Yunnan; our nephrite is Xinjiang material bought through suppliers. Everything we sell is natural: Type A jadeite, and nephrite that is natural, not dyed. Because "Is this real jade?" is still the question I hear most, every piece ships with an NGTC identification certificate, which you can check against the lab's own record with our verification guide. More about how BMjade started is on our About us page.

Sources

• Gemological Institute of America. "Jade." GIA gem encyclopedia. Accessed October 2026.
• Gemological Institute of America. "Jade Quality Factors." GIA gem encyclopedia. Accessed October 2026.
• Harper, Douglas. "Jade (n.1)." Online Etymology Dictionary. Accessed October 2026.
• Bradt, R. C., R. E. Newnham and J. V. Biggers. "The Toughness of Jade." American Mineralogist 58 (1973): 727-732.
• Hughes, Richard W., Olivier Galibert, George Bosshart, Fred Ward, Thet Oo, Mark Smith, Tay Thye Sun and George E. Harlow. "Burmese Jade: The Inscrutable Gem." Gems & Gemology, Spring 2000.