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San Francisco Chronicle​

Some Bay Area couples are ditching engagement diamonds. Here's what they're buying instead

When Emilie Jehng was a teenager in San Jose in the early 2000s, jade wasn't cool. She thought the green gemstone was gaudy and primarily associated with Asian culture, which, she said, wasn't desirable among her peers. Now, as a jeweler with a cult following for designs that pay homage to her Asian American heritage, Jehng is suddenly hearing from more and more couples who want to commission jade wedding jewelry. 'The diamond symbolizes America — the platonic ideal of the beautiful, American girl — and then jade is this unsung hero that's every bit as valuable or as beautiful,' Jehng said. Jade, of course, isn't just for weddings. And it's been finding a new market among young people, and not just with Asian folks. On the internet, the gemstone has been tagged in viral TikTok posts of people from a range of racial backgrounds squeezing their hands through jade bangles in West Coast jewelry stores. Jade and fake jade face sculpting tools are now available at mainstream stores like Target, Sephora and World Market. In April, internet cool girl and Swedish clothing designer Julia Dang posted a video of her girlfriend's proposal with a chunky, pale green jade engagement ring. Chloe Zhao, who thought jade was 'too old school' as a kid growing up in China, has also noticed more interest in the gemstone from millenials and Gen Z, which is why she started her popular New York-based, jade-centric jewelry brand Seree in 2021. In May, Zhao, 33, flashed her own jade and diamond engagement ring. Now she's planning an engagement line. 'We see more and more interest in jade, not only from Asian Americans who are reconnecting with the roots, but also, more and more Americans in general,' she said. Jehng thinks jade is a fitting material for couples who want to redefine what love looks like. While diamonds are meant to stay the same forever, jade is known to take on new hues and opacities with time, and depending on the person wearing it. 'Jade is described as a living thing,' she said. 'My mom used to say that jade is like a heart of stone on your body.' In May, the traditional start of 'wedding season,' Jehng was working on rings for Emma Burke and Liz Phung, who felt, as a queer couple, that a lot of wedding traditions, including diamond engagement rings, were outdated. They landed on contrasting ring designs — one rectangular, the other round — with gemstones cut from the same hunk of marbly light green jade. 'A lot of couples are creating their own definition of what they want the engagement or the wedding to be,' Jehng said. 'It's interesting how that approach then filters into what material they want.' And as a new taste for jade emerges in the States, so do new preferences for what the ideal jade, which comes in all kinds of colors, opacities and price points, looks like. In China, jade that's 'more even, more glowy, more translucent' is popular, Jehng said. 'In the States with my clients, they prefer pieces that have more variants in it, that maybe have green veining, maybe they're more milky,' she said. One of Jehng's earlier commissions came from Horacio Lopez, who met his wife while they were working at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2018, and who didn't know much about the classifications of jade. Both Lopez and his wife, Summer Li, had reservations about traditional weddings, which also showed up in their choice of wedding jewelry. 'We both have these questions about pushing back on certain traditions, but also, 'How do I also show some sort of admiration or love?'' Lopez said. Li proposed to Lopez during a bike ride at Stanley Park in Vancouver, not a ring in sight. Lopez later gave Li an unconventional, snake-shaped engagement ring inlaid with small diamonds, an homage to Li being born in 1989, the year of the snake. But for their wedding bands, Lopez landed on a gemstone that he remembered seeing in both Chinese and Mexican museum exhibits. 'A mutual material that we both have in common, her being of Chinese ancestry and me being of Mexican ancestry, was jade,' he said. For Lopez, who's getting his masters in sound design at Brooklyn College, and Li, who's a graphic designer, their budget-conscious approach to wedding jewelry made jade more appealing since they didn't want to go down the 'traditional, really expensive diamond route.' Fiancees Nathan Lewis and Annie Gonzales, who also went to Jehng for their wedding jewelry, had similar misgivings about the marriage industrial complex and existing traditions. Lewis, who's Jamaican British, and Gonzales, who's Filipina American, had been talking about marriage for a while. Gonzales had one condition, though. 'Annie's one thing was that she didn't want a diamond,' Lewis said. Seven years after Lewis and Annie first met in college in 2017, Lewis got down on one knee on a pathway lined with trees in the Brooklyn Botanical Garden, while Gonzales' twin sister hid out of sight with a camera to photograph the proposal. Lewis fumbled for the ring in his jacket pocket. 'I was like, 'Oh, what's happening right now?'' Gonzales remembered. 'And then it was very sweet, and I cried a little.' The ring isn't a conventional, sparkly diamond set in yellow gold, per Gonzales' request. Instead, a white gold band curves between two stones, one sapphire and one jade, which is translucent and round like a freshly peeled grape. The absence of a diamond did incite some 'shock' amongst older family members. The couple didn't want a traditional ceremony either, they said from their Brooklyn apartment, Gonzales' childhood skateboard mounted on the wall behind them. There will be no white dress, a tiered cake or a huge, formal ceremony. When Patrick Xu and Jessica Wang first met as interns at Facebook in 2015, they weren't thinking about marriage. But their relationship progressed, and in April 2024 they asked Jehng to make them jade rings akin to wedding bands. 'I'm struggling to find the right word because there's what everyone else will understand, which I think is an engagement or a wedding ring,' Wang said. 'I just think of it as a commitment to a life partnership.' Xu doesn't love the performance of weddings, which he feels are mostly for other people, not the couple. And instead of the typical diamond, they decided on jade for its homage to their shared Chinese heritage. 'It was important for me when I thought about these rings to deconstruct all of that,' Xu said. Xu and Wang, who live in Berkeley, envision having a quiet, private moment in a nearby park this summer to exchange love letters and their rings: two jade rectangles cut from the same stone and inlaid in 18k gold bands. At her jewelry studio, Jehng was sorting through chunks of jade she'd bought at a gem show in Arizona. She remembered, as a teen, not wanting to wear the jade pendant her mother and aunt had gifted her at birth because it was 'too visibly Asian.' 'I feel like when we're younger, you don't want anything that differentiates you from anyone,' she said. 'That's funny because that's exactly why I feel like people are coming to me for these pieces — because they want something that's different.'