This is just my opinion, so take it as my 2 cents. I’m pretty socially anxious so I don’t post a lot, but I’ve been thinking about this for a while.
I feel like there are a lot more jade sellers popping up recently, especially online. A lot of them seem like hobbyists/collectors who slowly turned into sellers, which I don’t think is automatically bad. Everyone starts somewhere. But I also think collecting jade and actually selling jade responsibly are two very different things.
Jade is honestly not easy. There’s treatment, heat, dye, Type A vs treated, certificate wording, lighting differences, flaws, cotton, stone lines, cracks, and just a lot of little details that can change how a buyer sees the piece. So when someone is selling jade, I feel like they should at least be able to explain those things or say clearly when they don’t know.
I’ve also seen some things lately that make me uncomfortable. Like sellers advertising themselves under bad review/drama posts, which feels kind of unhinged to me. The post is supposed to be about buyer safety or someone’s bad experience, not an opportunity to promote yourself.
And TikTok is even worse sometimes. I’ve seen jade sellers use super heavy filters, bright lights, smoothing, overexposure, all of that. Jade already looks different in every lighting, so when a seller adds a blue filters on top of that, it becomes really misleading. At that point it’s not just “good lighting” anymore.
Another thing is heat treatment. A lot of pieces I’ve seen offered in groups and on TikTok look heat-treated to me. Heat-treated jade is common in the market, and I don’t think it’s automatically bad if it’s disclosed. Some buyers are fine with it. But when sellers call everything “untreated,” that’s when I hesitate.
Because then I’m wondering, do they not know? Or do they know and just choose not to say it? Neither one makes me feel great as a buyer.
I’m not saying every new seller is a scammer. Some people are probably just new and still learning. But if you’re taking people’s money, especially for jade, I think you need to know what you’re selling. And if you don’t know, just say you don’t know. Don’t copy vendor words, call everything natural untreated jade, and hope the certificate makes it okay.
I also think part of the issue is that jade education in the U.S. is still pretty weak. A lot of better jade info is in Chinese/Myanmar/Asia-general spaces, markets, labs, or just from people who have handled a lot of pieces in real life. So I get that it’s hard to learn here. But that’s also why sellers should be more careful, not more confident.
Again, this is just my opinion. I’m not trying to attack hobbyist sellers since I know a few good ones on this sub. I just think jade is expensive and easy to misrepresent, even by accident. Buyers deserve better than filtered videos, vague claims, and sellers acting super confident when they might not actually know enough yet.