Most explanations stop at “Type A is real and Type B is fake.” Neither half of that sentence is true, and the actual difference is far more interesting — and far more expensive.

Search for jade treatment and you will find the same paragraph reproduced across dozens of sites: Type A is natural, Type B is treated, Type C is dyed, buy Type A.

The advice is correct. The explanation behind it is usually wrong in ways that leave buyers unable to reason about what they’re looking at — unable to say why the price gap exists, why it varies enormously depending on where in the market you’re standing, or why a Type B piece that looks superb today is a poor purchase anyway.

Here is what the classification actually describes, and what it does to price.

What the letters mean, and what they don’t

The A / B / C system classifies jadeite by processing history. It is not a quality grade, and reading it as one is the single most common misunderstanding in the trade.

Type A is untreated jadeite. It has been cut, carved and polished, and conventionally given a thin surface wax after polishing — a finishing step universally accepted as leaving the material unaltered. The stone’s colour and structure are what came out of the ground.

Type B is jadeite that has been soaked in strong acid to dissolve out brown and yellow iron staining, then vacuum-impregnated with polymer resin to fill the voids the acid created and restore transparency and cohesion. The colour that remains is natural. The structure holding it together, in large part, is not.

Type C is jadeite that has been dyed. Colour has been introduced that was never in the stone.

Type B+C has been both bleached-and-impregnated and dyed.

Two things follow immediately.

First, Type B jadeite is real jadeite. It is not glass, not quartzite, not a substitute mineral. It was mined as jadeite and it remains jadeite. Any laboratory will identify the species as jadeite. This is why “is it real jade?” is close to a useless question, and why sellers can answer it truthfully while telling you nothing.

Second, “natural” is not a treatment claim. Type B material is natural jadeite that has been processed. A listing leaning on “natural,” “genuine,” “real” or “100% authentic” while never using the word “untreated” or stating the classification is doing something specific with language, and it is worth noticing.

Why Type B looks better than the stone it started as

To understand the price gap you have to understand what the treatment is for, which is not what most people assume.

Treatment is not applied to good material. It is applied to material that would otherwise be nearly unsellable: jadeite with brown or yellow iron staining running through it, dull and cloudy, coarse in texture — the sort of rough that appears at the bottom of the market in large volume because most jadeite is not attractive.

The acid removes the staining. It does this by attacking the boundaries between the interlocking crystals, dissolving iron compounds and, unavoidably, dissolving part of the structure itself. What comes out is paler, cleaner and structurally compromised — porous, weak, and often chalky.

The polymer impregnation then fills that void network. Resin has a refractive index closer to jadeite than air does, so filling the gaps dramatically increases apparent transparency. The stone becomes translucent in a way it never was in the ground.

The result frequently looks better than mid-grade untreated material. This is not a marginal cosmetic improvement — it is a transformation, and it is precisely why the treatment exists.

So the honest description of Type B is not “damaged jade.” It is poor jade that has been made to resemble good jade, using a process that works extremely well on the day and less well every year afterwards.

Where the price gap comes from

Given that a treated piece can look better than an untreated one, why does the market price them so far apart?

Four reasons, and they compound.

The starting material was cheap. Treatment is applied to rough that had little value. The underlying asset is low-grade jadeite, and no amount of processing changes what was bought.

The process is inexpensive and scalable. Acid and resin cost very little and the treatment runs in batches. Anything that can be produced in quantity from cheap inputs prices accordingly.

The result is not durable. More on this below, but a material with a known service life prices below one without.

And the supply of untreated fine material is genuinely constrained. Jadeite forms only in subduction-zone conditions and commercial supply comes overwhelmingly from a single area of northern Myanmar. Untreated material of good colour and translucency is scarce in a hard geological sense. Treated material is limited only by how much poor rough exists, which is a great deal.

Two of these pull the price of Type B down and two push the price of Type A up. The gap is the product of both movements, not one.

Why the gap widens as quality rises

This is the part that gets left out, and it changes how a buyer should think.

At the bottom of the market the gap is modest. A small, opaque, pale untreated piece and a small treated piece are both inexpensive, and the difference between them, while real, is not dramatic in absolute terms.

At the top it is enormous. Fine untreated jadeite with strong even colour and high translucency is among the most valuable gem material on earth, competing at auction with coloured diamonds. There is no treated equivalent, because treatment cannot manufacture the top of the market — it can lift poor material to the appearance of mid-grade, but it cannot produce the depth of colour and structural fineness that defines genuinely fine jadeite.