Under the microscope: Asprey launches jade certification process

Asprey chair John Rigas’s introduction to jade was during a trip to Yangon in Myanmar in 2014, during which he became enchanted by the so-called Stone of Heaven. “It has this magnetic effect on you . . . It draws you in and you get mesmerised,” says Rigas, a former financier who bought Asprey 18 years ago.

Jade — which is referred to as jadeite when it is translucent — is highly prized in Asian cultures. It is found in a variety of colours, with the vibrant green imperial jadeite the most valuable. The market for it is vast, and top-quality examples can command high prices. For example, the Qing dynasty jadeite Hutton-Mdivani necklace, with 27 beads, was bought back by its creator, Cartier, for $27.4mn during a 2014 Sotheby’s auction.

After building a personal collection of jade, Rigas took the idea of a jade collection to the board at Asprey. With few big brands trading seriously in jade, he saw a commercial opportunity in a market that his own research estimated to be worth somewhere between $8bn and $30bn.

When Asprey launched its jade collection, the jeweller tapped into Rigas’s network of dealers in Hong Kong, Singapore and Thailand to amass a supply of jade that he says is worth “tens of millions of dollars”. The collection focuses on top-quality imperial jadeite, as well as rarities such as red jadeite and tricolour bangles. Prices range from $40,000 for a jadeite cabochon ring, to jade objets d’art and jewels that have price tags in the millions.

“The big French brands had been trying for a long time to find large sources of jadeite to launch collections, but they had been unable,” says Rigas. “No other brand offers imperial jadeite in a whole collection where you can buy one, two, three or five pieces.”

This makes for an intriguing proposition for a luxury house such as Asprey — but there is one hurdle. In the jade world, there are a lot of fakes and hidden treatments that can be hard to spot.

“In 1985, in Myanmar, they discovered a mine with rather poor-quality jadeite, but the Chinese didn’t want to waste it so they devised a new treatment,” explains Rosamond Clayton, a gemmologist and jewellery valuer with a specialism in jade.

“The treatment has become more sophisticated but, basically, they treat it with hydrochloric acid to bleach it and stabilise it by covering it with polymer resin.” It can also be dyed and, although doing this reduces its value, Clayton says she sees dyed jade selling “reasonably expensively at auction”.

Dyeing is easy to spot, she says, but the polymer resin technique is not. “People think they can tell, but you can’t — it’s got to be submitted to a laboratory,” points out Clayton, who first started valuing jade in Kowloon in the early 1980s.

Many gemmological laboratories offer jade testing, but Rigas feels they “don’t have much expertise in jade, nor do they have the equipment to analyse jade”.

For this reason, he entered into an exclusive partnership with Oxford university’s Department of Earth Sciences in 2022 to develop jade testing. Every piece of jade sold by Asprey is tested there, and clients are presented with the report. The pieces are laser-etched with a corresponding number, with the etching made below the surface of the jade using proprietary spectroscopy-like technology developed by Earth Sciences. It is only visible at 10x magnification. All of the report information is logged in blockchain.

The Earth Sciences jade reports are lengthy. One report assessing jadeite carved into the form of a walnut runs to 38 pages of highly scientific texts, all to deliver a topline of: “Natural jadeite with no indication of resin.”

As well as providing Asprey’s clients with reassurance on what they are purchasing, Rigas hopes the programme developed with Earth Sciences could standardise jade testing. While Earth Sciences and Asprey have an exclusive deal, Rigas says the jeweller would encourage external parties, such as collectors or industry professionals, to send jade to the lab for testing via Asprey.

However, the cost might make this prohibitive for third parties. A batch of three tests carried out in the lab in Oxford costs £26,000, with the fee incorporated into the final retail price of Asprey jade. By contrast, a report from the Gemological Institute of America (GIA) — the standard bearer in gem grading — can cost between $85 and $1,100 for a single stone, depending on weight, and tests for dyeing and impregnation, while also identifying the type of jade and commenting on its colour and transparency.

The reason Oxford’s solution is so much more expensive, according to Louisa Bailey, the department’s head of administration and finance, is because of the equipment involved: the jade is tested by scientists using three machines. “There’s the XRD [X-ray diffractometer machine] to ensure that it’s mineralogically jadeite,” she says. “There’s the SEM [scanning electron microscope], which has different scales to show crystal grain boundaries and any significant signs of etching processing. And, then, we use our FTIR [Fourier transform infrared spectrometer] with the aim of looking for areas that may have impregnated materials, such as resin or glue.”

But Richard Hughes, senior vice-president of Bangkok-based consultancy Lotus Gemology, and author of the book Jade: A Gemologist’s Guide, doubts there will be industry demand for testing that would standardise jade — and its price — in the way that diamonds have been through the four Cs (cut, clarity, carat and colour).

[Quantifying jade is like] trying to describe a painting, or a face, in a word.

“[Quantifying jade is like] trying to describe a painting, or a face, in a word,” he says. “It just doesn’t work. Traders don’t use these services by and large, because they’re not an accurate description of what our eyes see. Dealers buy based on whether they think they can sell at a profit, through their experience, and knowing who their customers are and what they’re looking for.”

Rigas agrees, to an extent. While he believes colour can be standardised, he admits “translucency is very difficult to standardise”. What does excite him about the science-based approach is being able to give Asprey clients a definitive answer as to whether a piece of jade has been treated or not — something crucial when prices stretch into the millions.

“We have to be really careful what we put our name on,” says Rigas. “Our certifications have to be super scientific, so that if someone buys [jade] from Asprey, they know it is what it is.”