Every so often we get asked some version of the same question: "why is this bracelet $300 and that necklace $8,000, when both are certified Type A jadeite?" It's a fair question, and the honest answer is that certification and price are answering two completely different things. Here's what actually sets the price on a piece of genuine jadeite — and why our premium pieces are priced the way they are.
Certification tells you it's real — not what it's worth
A Type A lab certificate confirms one thing: the jadeite is natural and untreated, with no acid bleaching, no polymer filling, no dye. That's the line between genuine jade and the Type B/C material we've written about in our grading guide, and it's independently verified the way we explain in our lab authentication post. But "Type A" is a pass/fail test, not a quality score. A $250 piece and an $8,000 piece can both pass it just as genuinely — the certificate simply isn't designed to tell you which is rarer. (Some genuine pieces, like our handmade-in-Australia line, are priced without going through a lab certificate at all — a different trade-off, not a lesser one.)
The four factors that actually set the price
Colour. Jadeite's colour hierarchy has been consistent for centuries: the most intense, evenly saturated "imperial" green sits at the top, followed by apple green, lavender, and then the icy/white tones — with rarer hues like black chicken (wuji) and vivid lavender-green combinations commanding their own premium. Colour value actually rests on three things together, not the hue alone: vibrancy, saturation, and how evenly it's distributed through the piece. Even within "green," a slightly muddy or unevenly distributed tone is worth a fraction of a bright, consistent one — which is why two pieces described as the exact same colour name can sell for very different prices.
Translucency ("shuitou"). This is how far light travels into the stone before scattering — what buyers often describe as a piece looking "icy" or "glassy." The trade recognises four broad levels, from rarest to most common: glassy, icy, jelly, and bean, each one letting noticeably less light through than the last. High translucency is genuinely rare in nature because of how it forms: it takes jadeite crystallising slowly, often over a very long geological timeframe, to develop the tightly interlocked mineral structure fine enough to let light travel before scattering. Younger or faster-formed material simply has larger, looser grains that stop light at the surface, no matter how good the colour is — which is why translucency is one of the biggest single drivers of price, independent of colour entirely.
Texture ("zhong"). This is about grain size — how fine and tight the jadeite's crystal structure is, checked under a loupe. Finer-grained jadeite, where the individual mineral fibres are too small to see, reads as smoother and more luminous and takes a higher polish; coarser material can be entirely genuine and untreated and still look distinctly grainier, because the crystals themselves are simply larger and more visible. Texture and translucency tend to move together in the same stone — both come from the same underlying crystal structure — but a stone can occasionally have surprisingly fine texture without matching translucency, or vice versa, which is part of why an experienced grader checks both separately rather than assuming one from the other.
Craftsmanship — cutting, carving, and setting. This is the factor that's easiest to underrate, because it's about skill rather than the raw stone, but it genuinely moves price as much as the material does. A cutter's job starts with reading unpredictable rough and orienting every cut to keep the best colour and clearest translucency on show while cutting away cracks and cloudy patches — a bangle makes the stakes obvious, since it's cut as one continuous ring from a single piece of rough, so the cutter needs an unbroken path of well-matched material running the whole way around, often at the cost of most of the original boulder. Carving a motif — a Buddha, a Guanyin, a ping an kou — adds a second layer: a skilled carver works with a stone's natural colour zones rather than against them, sometimes shaping a design deliberately around a patch of russet "skin" colour rather than cutting it away, so the piece reads as intentional. For a matched beaded necklace, the skill shifts to sourcing rather than cutting — finding 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 fully matched strand costs what it does. And a fine, even polish — achieved without overheating delicate veins or grinding unevenly across zones of differing hardness in the same stone — is its own mark of skill, part of why two pieces cut from similar-quality rough can still look noticeably different once finished. Add 18k gold settings, diamonds, or moissanite, and the metal and stonework cost stacks on top of the jade itself.
Why genuine Type A prices legitimately span such a wide range
When we checked how our pricing compares to other certified Type A Burmese jadeite on the market, we found the same pattern everywhere: identical grading claims sitting anywhere from around $150 to well over $20,000, all equally genuine. That's not a red flag — it's exactly what you'd expect once you understand that "Type A" only measures authenticity, while colour, translucency, texture, and craftsmanship measure everything else. A wide range is the market working correctly, not a sign that someone is over- or under-charging.
What this means for our premium pieces
Our higher-priced pieces — like our Icy Lake Green Ping An Kou pendant above, or our Imperial Green beaded necklace above — sit where they do because they combine several of these rare factors at once: saturated, evenly distributed colour; genuinely icy translucency; fine texture; and, for the necklace, a fully matched strand where every bead needed to meet all three of those standards simultaneously. The pendant's rarity is its own kind: finding a single stone clean and consistent enough, at that size and translucency, to cut into one continuous Ping An Kou shape with no flaw showing through, then set in 18k gold to match its quality. That's worth sitting with — sourcing one exceptional stone like that is hard enough; sourcing dozens that all match, as the necklace requires, is a different order of rarity again, which is reflected in the price.
Buying with confidence at any budget
None of this means an entry piece is a lesser choice — every piece we sell, from a $200 pendant to an $8,000 necklace, passes the same Type A certification and carries our Authenticity Guarantee, a 100% money-back lifetime guarantee: if a GIA lab report ever finds a piece isn't genuine Type A jadeite, we refund you in full, at any time, with proof of purchase. The only thing that changes as price goes up is the rarity of the colour, translucency, texture, and craftsmanship combination — never the genuineness of the stone. And whatever you choose, a little proper care keeps that value intact for decades to come.
If you're weighing up pieces at different price points and want a second opinion on what you're actually looking at, get in touch — we're always happy to talk you through what makes one piece rarer than another.