Icy, Lavender, Imperial: A Grammar of Jadeite

Jadeite humbles collectors trained on faceted stones. It has no fire to measure, no facets to grade; its qualities are read the way one reads porcelain or calligraphy, by colour, substance and touch, against three thousand years of accumulated taste.

First, the question of type

Before beauty comes honesty. Type A jadeite is natural material, its colour untouched, finished only with traditional wax. Type B has been acid bleached and impregnated with polymer; Type C dyed. Serious collecting concerns Type A exclusively, and laboratory certification of type is the precondition of any significant purchase.

Colour

The summit is imperial green, vivid, even, sunlit emerald colour from chromium. Around it spread the apple and spinach greens, the blue greens, and two connoisseur categories of their own: lavender, coloured by manganese, at its best a soft violet with the texture of mist; and the reds and honeys the market calls, collectively, fei cui's warmer register.

Water

The trade's most beautiful term of art: a jadeite's translucency is its water. Fine material transmits light as if holding it; the recent rise of icy jadeite, nearly colourless, nearly transparent, shows the market learning to prize water almost above colour itself.

A jadeite's translucency is its water; the finest material holds light the way a river holds sky.

Texture and craft

Under the loupe, fine jadeite is a fabric of microscopic crystals; the tighter the weave, the finer the polish and the deeper the lustre. And because jadeite is carved, not faceted, the object's craft is inseparable from its value: a bangle's perfect circle, a plaque's carving, the wit of a pea pod rendered in green.

The Genesis workshop

Jadeite forms the largest single body of work in the Genesis archive: icy plaques and leaves, lavender peonies, pods of fortune, bangles of near transparency, and a necklace of nine vivid greens: each, in the house's practice, a conversation between stone and setting.