A little project that I did recently involved finding some dark "spinach green" jade beads for a project. When I ran out of the British Columbia nephrite beads that I had purchased over 10 years ago, I bought some additional dark green "jade" stone beads of unknown composition from a bead society member, and then purchased an entire strand of beads for $8 at a local bead show. The latter were designated British Columbia jade and were at a table piled high with extremely inexpensive strands.

Once I got the beads home, it was clear that the three groups of beads were different in color, although only slightly. Since I had enough to play with, I decided to smash one bead from each set to see what happened, and to see if the qualitative properties were different using this crude impact test. Jades are supposed to be very tough minerals. (Note: this was one of those times I actually missed still having my technical job since I tested materials for a living and could have done this in the lab with great precision. But no, I'm not going back!)

Anyway, here are the images of the beads and the results.

The original B.C. nephrite, which was sold by a vendor that had nothing but this material at the show and as I recall it was rather pricey. I believe it was correctly identified, since it was extremely difficult to smash with my sledge hammer. It took several blows to break the bead, and the fracture surfaces are whitish. This was a very tough material.

The darkest green beads from the bead society member took less muscle to break, and the bead shattered into many small shards. My Gemstones of the World book describes jadeite fracture as "splintery, brittle" so my tentative ID for this material is jadeite.

The $8 strand from the bead show had the lightest color green, and I fully expected them to show some sort of dyed surface and white core, as I suspected dyed howlite. The beads were quite easy to break, but as you can see the color goes right through. I don't know what this stone could be - any ideas? Certainly they were not B.C. nephrite. And, I think I read somewhere that the Chinese are calling any reasonably dark green stone "B.C. jade", which of course is very confusing and I'm sure deliberately so.

So there's the latest from sunny dry California - smashing beads on the cement floor of the garage in an attempt to match materials. But, I'm fully expecting that some forum members like Danny have done similar experiments and may have some comments.