The Colours

From a creamy, milk-warm white to the cleanest bright white, to white carrying one thin line of blue — this whole family answers to the same name.

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 that is soft rather than stark.

In the hand or worn, it reads gentle. It asks for very little around it, which is why we so often leave it alone on silk, or set it plainly in silver.

From the dense green of spinach leaves down to shades so deep they admit their green only under strong light — rich, never black, is the family's rule.

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, deep in any light.

Its lustre is soft rather than glassy, and it carries gold particularly well.

The widest family of all: bright as a young green apple at one end, softening to a powdery pale celadon at the other — cool as a duck-egg shell, calm as lake water on a fine day.

The young shade of the palette: a pale, clear green like willow leaves that opened this morning.

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.

From a pale, sun-warmed yellow-green to fuller tones where gold and green carry equal weight.

Where willow green reads cool and leafy, golden green is shot through with yellow — the shade of new olive oil, of grass at summer's end, of green tea in its first pour. In some stones the yellow leads; in others it only warms the green from below — the warmth the family is named for.

It is the green that keeps the sun in it, warm in any light; beside yellow gold, stone and metal seem to continue one another.

Russet sugar, chestnut brown, tones that deepen almost to black — like syrup taken slowly from light to dark over the fire.

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.

From the pale gold of new honey to a full, rich amber, on to deeper, browner tones — best judged in natural light, where its depth declares itself.

The lightest, warmest note we cut: a mellow gold between honey and amber, with a soft, even lustre.

Indoors it reads quiet and tea-toned; in daylight, fuller and more golden.

From a near-white blush to a deeper rose-beige, a little grey always folded in.

The name comes from the Chinese kitchen, not the pond: the pink of fresh-cut lotus root — tender, milky — a pink with its voice lowered, closer to shell and silk than to any flower.

Worn close, it sits nearly at skin tone — the shade that keeps the smallest distance from its wearer — and it takes both metals well: warmer beside gold, cooler beside silver.

From the palest lavender-white to a deep, shadowed grey-violet — often within a single piece, the colour shading from pale to deep like smoke thinning into air.

A cool, quiet violet veiled in grey — never bright, never sweet: the lilac of dusk rather than of gardens. The name is apt: the purple looks as if seen through smoke — denser in places, fainter in others.

It is the palette's half-light colour — grey in low light, faintly violet in sun — and it belongs with silver, tone on tone, the way smoke belongs to evening.

The ink settles in three ways — speckled, pooled, or filling the stone almost entirely; however much pale ground remains, the signature is the stone's own.

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.

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.

Now and then a single stone carries more than one colour at once — sugar drifting into white, or a flash of bright green resting on a pale ground. Such pieces are filed under Multi-Colour, and each piece's page names its colours plainly.