The Colours
Nephrite keeps its colour the way it keeps everything else — slowly. Traces of iron, settled into the stone as it formed, deepen the greens and warm the browns; where the stone holds almost none, it stays as pale as candlelight. Nothing is added and nothing is coaxed: the colour you see is the mineral itself.
And because every piece is cut from natural stone, no two are ever quite alike. Read these notes as a field guide rather than a catalogue of standards — the shade that reaches you belongs to your piece alone.
Suet White
The quietest of our colours: a white with body rather than brilliance, faintly warm — wax by lamplight, snow at dusk. The old trade name, suet, describes exactly this: a white you seem to look into, rather than at.
In the hand it reads soft; against the skin it turns luminous. It asks for very little around it, which is why we so often leave it alone on silk, or set it plainly in silver.
Spinach Green
A deep, even green with the calm of still water — the colour auction catalogues have called spinach green for over a century. It is the green most people mean when they picture nephrite: dense, settled, almost bottomless in good light.
Worn daily, it seems to darken into itself, the polish slowly taking on that soft, waxen sheen only nephrite develops. It carries gold particularly well.
Willow Green
The young shade of the palette: a pale, clear green like willow leaves that opened this morning, often carrying a gentle translucence at the edges where the light slips through.
It is the lightest-hearted of our greens — fresh beside summer linen, quiet against winter wool — and it pairs with silver as naturally as leaves with rain.
Caramel
A warm brown with toasted depth, running from tawny to near-chestnut — the way sugar passes through amber on its way to darkness. In some stones the tone lies even; in others it drifts, like tea clouding slowly in water.
Caramel flatters gold and warms every skin it touches; of all our colours, it is the one that reads most like autumn.
Honey-Amber
The lightest, warmest note we cut: a translucent gold between honey and amber, which seems to keep a little of the light that passes through it. Lifted to a window, a honey-amber bead glows at the rim like a small lantern.
It is a colour that rewards movement — indoors it rests quiet and tea-toned; in daylight, it wakes.
Ink Wash
Ink-dark clouds drifting through a pale ground: this is the stone painting in monochrome. Its Chinese name is borrowed from the blue-and-white porcelain whose spirit it echoes; some pieces carry a single decisive stroke, others a whole drifting weather-front of greys and blacks.
No two markings repeat, and none can be chosen twice — the pattern is the stone’s own signature. In its veining, every ink-wash piece is one of a kind.
Cat’s Eye
Not a colour but a phenomenon. Within certain stones, thousands of fine fibres lie parallel; polished into a dome, they gather the light into a single bright line that opens, glides and closes as the piece turns — what gemmologists call chatoyancy, from the French for cat’s eye.
It appears only in dome-cut stones, and only where nature has already done the aligning — we simply cut to meet it. Where a piece carries the effect, its name says so plainly: Spinach Green Cat’s Eye.
Colours are listed on each product page beside the piece; the tag states species and treatment, as always. And if you find yourself deciding between two shades, write to us — photographs of the exact piece are the surest guide.