If you've spent any time shopping for jade, you've probably run into terms like "Type A," "natural jadeite," or "grade A jade" and wondered whether they're marketing language or something that actually matters. They matter — a great deal. Jadeite grading isn't about picking a favourite colour off a shelf; it's about knowing whether the stone in front of you is what nature made, or what a lab has quietly altered. Here's what the grading system actually tells you, and why it should shape every jade purchase you make.
Our own standard is simple and non-negotiable: we only source Type A, natural, untreated jadeite. No bleaching, no polymer, no dye — ever. Everything below explains why that distinction matters so much, and how to check it for yourself.
Jadeite, not just "jade"
"Jade" is a catch-all term for two different minerals: nephrite and jadeite. Nephrite is softer, more common, and typically found in muted olive and spinach greens. Jadeite is the rarer, harder, and more prized of the two — it's what produces the vivid emerald greens, the icy translucence, and the lavenders and reds collectors chase. Nearly all fine jade jewellery, and everything in our own collection, is jadeite, with the majority of the world's finest material still coming from a single region of Myanmar (Burma) — which is why you'll often see it called Burmese jadeite.
The distinction that matters most: Type A, B, and C
Long before you get to colour or clarity, the single most important question for any piece of jadeite is: has it been treated? Gemological labs classify jadeite into three categories based on exactly this.
Type A is untreated jadeite. Nothing has been done to the stone beyond cutting and polishing, aside from the same light wax finish you'll see on many natural gemstones. Its colour, translucency, and texture are exactly as they formed underground, often over millions of years. Type A is the only category considered genuine, natural jade in the traditional sense, and it's the only type that holds and typically increases in value over time. It's also the only category we work with — every piece we source, without exception, starts as Type A material.
Type B jadeite has been chemically bleached to strip out unwanted impurities and brown veining, then impregnated with a clear polymer resin to fill the resulting cavities and restore some transparency. The colour is natural, but the treatment weakens the stone's internal structure. Over years, the polymer can yellow, and the piece can become more brittle. It will typically look a little too clean, too even, almost glassy in a way natural jade rarely is.
Type C jadeite has been dyed to introduce or intensify colour — most often to fake the prized "imperial green" or a vivid lavender. The dye can fade or shift with sunlight and skin contact over time, and often shows as colour concentrated in the surface cracks rather than distributed naturally through the stone.
Many pieces on the market are actually Type B+C — both bleached/impregnated and dyed. None of this is necessarily disclosed unless you're dealing with a seller who tests and certifies their stock, which is exactly why a gemological certificate matters more with jade than with almost any other gemstone.
How to actually tell the difference
Some signs are visible without equipment: Type A jadeite tends to show natural colour variation and fine, fibrous texture under magnification, while treated stone often looks unnaturally uniform or has a slightly plastic, waxy surface sheen. Genuine jadeite also feels cool and notably heavy for its size, since it's denser than most imitation materials.
A UV light test is another accessible way to screen a piece before it ever reaches a lab. Under a long-wave UV light, the polymer resin used to impregnate Type B jadeite typically fluoresces with a chalky, bluish-white glow, since the resin reacts to UV in a way natural jadeite doesn't. Type A jadeite is generally inert under the same light, or shows only a faint, cloudy natural fluorescence with none of the resin's telltale brightness. It isn't foolproof — not every resin fluoresces strongly, and dye used in Type C material doesn't reliably show up this way at all — but a strong blue-white glow under UV is a clear signal to look more closely, if not walk away outright.
A quick look at the UV test in practice — genuine Type A jadeite stays largely inert under long-wave UV light, without the chalky glow you'd see from a resin-impregnated Type B piece.
That said, we won't pretend a loupe, a UV torch, and a confident eye are a substitute for lab testing. Reliable identification of Type A jadeite versus a well-executed Type B or C treatment usually requires infrared spectroscopy, which is exactly what a proper gemological report verifies. This is why the large majority of what we sell comes with certification confirming it is Type A, untreated, natural jadeite — so you're never relying on guesswork, ours or yours. Curious what that certification process actually involves? See how jadeite is authenticated inside China's gem testing labs.
Once you know it's Type A: grading for quality
With treatment status confirmed, the next layer of grading is about the qualities that determine a piece's beauty and value:
Colour is graded on three things at once: hue, saturation, and evenness — not just "which green." The trade's rough order of value runs green, then lavender, then red, then yellow, white, and grey, with one exception: black jadeite (sometimes called "wuji") is unremarkable on its own, but if it shows a strong green undertone when held up to intense light, it jumps well up that ladder. Within any single hue, two stones can still be worlds apart in value — a vivid, evenly saturated green outranks a duller or patchier green of the exact same shade, which is why "it's green" tells you almost nothing about what a piece is actually worth. Jadeite also spans a wide range worth knowing beyond green itself — icy near-colourless "ice jade," and warm russet "skin" colours that skilled carvers sometimes work into a design rather than cut away, which we'll come back to below.
Translucency — what the trade calls shuitou, or "water" — is graded across four recognised levels, from most to least prized: glassy, where light passes through almost like window glass and which only the finest aged material ever reaches; icy, highly translucent and still collection-grade; jelly, a softer, milky translucence; and bean, where light barely penetrates and the structure looks distinctly grainy. The reason translucency varies so much comes down to how the stone actually formed: jadeite that crystallised slowly over a very long time develops a tightly interlocked internal structure fine enough to let light travel some distance before it scatters, while faster-formed or less mature material has larger, looser mineral grains that scatter light almost immediately at the surface. That's also why translucency and texture (next) are really two views of the same underlying story, rather than two unrelated qualities.
Texture refers to how fine and tight the jadeite's crystal structure is, and it's usually the first thing an experienced eye checks under a loupe. Held up to light and magnified, fine-textured jadeite shows individual mineral grains too small to make out distinctly, which is exactly what gives it a smooth, luminous, almost liquid appearance and lets it take a higher, glassier polish. Coarser-textured material shows visibly larger, more separated grains even in good light — it can be entirely genuine, entirely untreated, and still never achieve the same luminosity, simply because the raw material it was cut from had a looser structure to begin with. This is the same aged-versus-young distinction that drives translucency: fine, tight texture and high translucency tend to travel together in the same stone.
Cutting and craftsmanship is the factor buyers most often overlook, and it can matter as much as the raw material itself. Every piece starts as rough stone with an uneven, unpredictable interior — a cutter's real skill is reading that rough (much as a dealer reads the ground-down "window" on a raw boulder, as we cover in the journey from Kachin mine to market) and orienting every cut to keep the best colour and highest translucency on show while cutting away cracks, cloudy patches, and inclusions. A bangle makes this obvious: it's cut as one continuous ring from a single piece of rough, so the cutter needs to find an unbroken path of clean, well-matched material running the whole way around — often sacrificing most of the original boulder to get there. Carving a motif like a Buddha, a Guanyin, or a ping an kou adds a second layer of skill on top: a good carver works with the stone's natural colour zones rather than against them, sometimes deliberately shaping a design around a patch of russet "skin" colour or a denser vein rather than cutting it away, so the finished piece reads as intentional rather than compromised. For a beaded strand or a matched pair, the skill shifts again — sourcing dozens of beads that are all genuinely close in colour, translucency, and texture is a far rarer feat than finding one good bead, which is exactly why a well-matched necklace commands the price it does. And the final polish matters too: a skilled polisher brings out an even, glassy finish without overheating fine veins or grinding unevenly across zones of different hardness within the same stone, which is part of why two pieces cut from similar-quality rough can still look noticeably different once finished.
These same four qualities — colour, translucency, texture, and craftsmanship — are exactly what separates a modestly priced Type A piece from one worth many times more. We go deeper into that in what actually drives jade pricing.
What this means for you as a buyer
None of this needs to be intimidating. The short version: ask whether a piece is Type A, ask for certification, and treat "natural colour, no additives" as non-negotiable rather than a nice-to-have. Once you know a piece is genuine, the rest — which green speaks to you, how translucent you want it, whether you're drawn to a bangle's continuous unbroken form or a pendant's more sculptural cut — comes down to taste.
We only source Type A, natural, untreated jadeite — that standard never changes. The large majority of our collection carries third-party lab certification proving it. A small handmade line, assembled here in Australia, doesn't carry that same paperwork — here's why, and how we still stand behind it as Type A — but the sourcing standard behind it is identical. If you'd like help understanding a specific piece's grading or certificate, we're always happy to walk through it with you.
Once you've chosen a piece, our jade care guide covers how to keep it looking its best, and our bangle & ring sizing guide will help you find the right fit before you buy.