A stone that refuses to be ordinary.

Jade is the colloquial name for two distinct minerals — nephrite, a calcium magnesium silicate prized in China for over eighty centuries, and jadeite, a sodium aluminium silicate that arrived later from Burma and dominates the modern luxury market. Both share a property no other stone offers in the same measure: a microcrystalline interlocking grain so dense that light, instead of bouncing off the surface, sinks into the stone before re-emerging as a slow, uniform glow.

This is the technical secret behind every fixture on this page. The translucency of fine jade is not a marketing word — it is a measurable optical phenomenon called sub-surface scattering. Photons enter the surface, refract through millions of interlocking microfibres, and exit as diffuse light. There are no hot spots. No glare. No engineered diffuser stands between the LED and your eye. The material itself is the diffuser, and it has been refining that role since the Hongshan culture began carving it in 6,000 BCE.

The Radilum jade collection is built on the simple recognition that a material with this kind of cultural gravity, this kind of optical character, and this kind of physical permanence has never properly entered the world of contemporary lighting. The fixtures we make are an attempt to correct that.

Four properties that change everything about how a room is lit.

Most lamp materials are chosen for the appearance of the lamp when it is off. Jade is one of the very few that earns its place in the room twice — once as object, and again as light source. The differences come down to four physical properties.

01 Translucent without being thin

Most translucent stones — alabaster, onyx, selenite — achieve their glow by being cut thin. Jade does not need to be. A 6 mm panel of fine Hetian white jade transmits roughly 15% to 22% of incident light, depending on grain orientation. The same panel weighs nearly twice what alabaster of equivalent thickness would. The result is a fixture that looks substantial when off and softly luminous when on — without the fragility that comes with thinner stones.

02 A natural warm-shift filter

Jade selectively absorbs the cooler end of the visible spectrum. A 2700K LED behind a panel of nephrite reaches the eye at roughly 2400K to 2500K — the colour temperature of late-afternoon sun, the colour of incandescent at half power. We design every Radilum jade fixture around this shift, choosing LEDs whose native temperature the stone will pull into the warm zone our customers actually want for living spaces.

03 No two pieces are identical

Every block carries the geological signature of the basin it was cut from — pale clouds, mineral veining, occasional iron pinpoints in the matrix. We grade for these signatures rather than against them. A Radilum Certificate of Origin ships with every fixture, identifying the basin, the block reference, and the technician who polished it. Two clients ordering the same model receive two distinct objects. This is by design.

04 A presence the room can feel even in the dark

Jade is dense — roughly 2.95 g/cm³ for nephrite, 3.30 for jadeite — and slow to change temperature. It feels cool to the hand. It absorbs ambient sound. A jade pendant hanging over a dining table reads as a piece of architecture more than a light source. The lamp is doing two jobs in one.