About — What Is It Made Of

What Is It Made Of treats the gua sha tool as a mineral specimen — composition, structure, hardness, treatments, and identification.

The premise

You already own one. This site does not help you choose a tool, rank materials, or tell you which stone suits which purpose; that’s a different question with plenty of answers elsewhere. The question here is always what is this object, and occasionally why did it do that.

That framing supports a level of technical detail a buying guide can’t. It also matches how people actually arrive at the subject: with something in their hand, a listing that said “100% natural jade,” and a suspicion.

The three categories

Nearly all confusion in this area comes from collapsing three separate things, and separating them is what this site is for:

Mineral species. Nephrite, jadeite, quartz, serpentine, obsidian. Defined by chemical composition and crystal structure. This is what a stone is.

Trade name. “New jade,” “Korean jade,” “Australian jade,” “Indian jade.” Marketing labels, often attached to a completely different species, often perfectly legal to use, and designed to be read as the thing they are not.

Treatment. Dyeing, waxing, polymer impregnation, reconstitution. Things done to a real material to change how it looks or behaves.

A single object can be a genuine mineral, sold under a misleading trade name, and treated — all at once. Every post here says which of the three it’s discussing.

What you’ll find

Nephrite and jadeite, and why the word jade legitimately covers two unrelated minerals with different compositions, hardnesses and price ranges. Serpentine, aventurine, amazonite, and the trade names built around them. Rose quartz and clear quartz, natural and synthetic. Obsidian, which is glass. Bian stone, which is a category rather than a species. Stainless steel and other non-stone tools as materials. How dye, wax and polymer treatments are actually performed, and what each leaves behind that can be detected. Mohs hardness against fracture toughness, and why the harder tool is often the one that chips. Thermal shock. And what a home test can and cannot establish, described honestly.

What you won’t find

Buying advice. No “best material for,” no comparisons framed as choosing, no prices, no sellers, no brands.

Care routines. Why a stone cracks in hot water is a material property and is in scope; how to look after your tool is not.

Technique. Nothing here is about how to use the object.

Crystal healing. Rose quartz is silicon dioxide with trace inclusions. Where metaphysical claims are commercially attached to a material, they’re noted once as marketing claims and not pursued in either direction.

Health claims. Materials don’t treat anything.

Invented mineralogy. Hardness values, compositions and densities here are correct or absent. No number gets rounded into existence to make a paragraph flow.

The honest limit

Reliable identification of jade and its imitations requires a gemmologist with instruments — refractive index, specific gravity, spectroscopy. Home tests narrow things down and rule some things out; they do not confirm. Every post says so, because every competing page implies otherwise.

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