The Doubly Fortunate jadeite earrings are a pair of vivid imperial-green jadeite cabochon ear pendants that achieved HK$153.5 million (approximately US$19.8 million) at Christie's Hong Kong on 26 November 2014, establishing a world auction record for any piece of jadeite jewellery. Each cabochon weighs approximately ten carats and displays the saturated, evenly distributed green colour — known in the trade as imperial green — that represents the pinnacle of jadeite valuation. The earrings passed through the hands of two of the twentieth century's most celebrated collectors of fine jewels: American heiress Barbara Hutton and Swiss-born socialite Nina Dyer. Their provenance, combined with the exceptional quality of the stones themselves, made the 2014 sale one of the defining moments in the modern market for Type A jadeite.

Gemmological Character

Jadeite, the sodium aluminium pyroxene NaAlSi₂O₆, is the rarer and more commercially prized of the two minerals popularly called jade, the other being nephrite. Imperial-green jadeite derives its colour primarily from trace quantities of chromium, the same element responsible for the red of ruby and the green of emerald. The finest material — the grade to which the Doubly Fortunate cabochons belong — combines three qualities that the Chinese trade summarises as zheng (pure hue, neither too yellow nor too blue), nong (saturation, rich but not blackish), and yang (brightness, a luminous inner glow). Translucency is a further critical criterion: top-grade jadeite transmits light in a way that gives the surface an almost liquid depth, quite unlike opaque or chalky material.

The cabochons of the Doubly Fortunate earrings are described in Christie's auction documentation as exhibiting all of these qualities simultaneously — a coincidence of colour, saturation, translucency, and clarity that is vanishingly rare in stones of ten-carat size. At that weight, maintaining uniform colour distribution without dark patches or pale windows is a function of both the original rough and the skill of the lapidary. The matched pair format adds a further layer of rarity: finding two cabochons of equivalent colour, translucency, and dimension from what is almost certainly the same piece of rough is an achievement that amplifies value considerably beyond that of a single stone.

Both stones are certified as Type A jadeite — meaning they are untreated, neither polymer-impregnated (Type B) nor artificially coloured (Type C). In the contemporary market, laboratory certification of Type A status from a recognised gemmological laboratory is effectively a prerequisite for serious bidding at the highest price levels, and the Doubly Fortunate earrings were accompanied by the relevant documentation confirming natural, untreated status.

Provenance: Barbara Hutton

Barbara Woolworth Hutton (1912–1979), heiress to the Woolworth retail fortune, was among the most prominent jewellery collectors of the mid-twentieth century and a client of Cartier, Van Cleef & Arpels, and other leading maisons. Her passion for jadeite was well documented and reflected a broader fascination with East Asian culture that shaped much of her personal life. Hutton acquired the jadeite cabochons and had them set as ear pendants, the precise date of acquisition remaining a matter of some uncertainty in the historical record, though it is consistent with her active collecting years of the 1930s through 1960s.

Hutton's jadeite holdings were notable even within her extraordinary collection. She is known to have owned the famous Hutton-Mdivani necklace — a strand of twenty-seven imperial-green jadeite beads that itself set successive auction records, most recently at Sotheby's Hong Kong in April 2014 for HK$214 million — making her one of the most significant single collectors of imperial jadeite in Western history. The earrings now known as Doubly Fortunate were part of this same aesthetic and collecting sensibility.

Provenance: Nina Dyer

Following Hutton, the earrings passed to Nina Dyer (1930–1965), a Swiss-born model and socialite of Anglo-Indian descent who was successively married to Baron Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza and Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan. Dyer was herself a collector of considerable taste, and her ownership of the earrings — however brief, given her death at thirty-five — added a further layer of glamour and historical weight to the piece. The passage of the earrings from Hutton to Dyer represents a transfer between two women who, in different registers, embodied mid-century international society's appetite for exceptional jewels.

The precise circumstances of the transfer from Dyer's estate into subsequent private ownership, and the chain of custody between Dyer's death in 1965 and the 2014 Christie's sale, have not been fully documented in publicly available sources. What is established is that the earrings emerged at auction in 2014 with their Hutton-Dyer provenance intact and verifiable.

The 2014 Christie's Sale

Christie's Hong Kong offered the earrings in its Magnificent Jewels sale of 26 November 2014, cataloguing them under the name Doubly Fortunate — a designation that resonates with Chinese cultural values around paired objects and auspicious number symbolism. In Chinese tradition, pairs carry inherent good fortune, and the number two is associated with harmony and balance; naming the earrings in this way was both culturally apt and commercially astute.

The hammer price of HK$153.5 million (inclusive of buyer's premium) surpassed the previous world auction record for jadeite jewellery and placed the earrings among the most valuable jewels sold at auction anywhere in the world that year. The result was widely reported in the specialist press and trade publications as confirmation of the sustained — and in many respects intensifying — appetite among collectors in Greater China, Hong Kong, and the broader Chinese diaspora for top-quality imperial jadeite.

The sale came in the same year as the record-breaking result for the Hutton-Mdivani necklace at Sotheby's, making 2014 a landmark year for imperial jadeite at auction. The two results together demonstrated that the market for the finest jadeite had reached a level of depth and confidence comparable to that for the finest Burmese rubies and Kashmir sapphires — stones that had previously commanded the highest per-carat prices in the coloured-gemstone world.

Imperial Green Jadeite in the Market

The concept of imperial green as a distinct quality grade has no single universally agreed definition, but in practice it refers to jadeite of the highest chromium-induced green, with strong saturation, good translucency, and freedom from grey or brown modifiers. The term originated in the association of such material with the Qing imperial court, where jadeite — introduced to China from Burma in significant quantities from the eighteenth century onward — rapidly supplanted nephrite in the preferences of the Manchu ruling class.

Per-carat values for imperial-green Type A jadeite cabochons at the finest quality level are among the highest of any coloured gemstone. Unlike diamonds, for which internationally standardised grading scales exist, jadeite is evaluated holistically, and the assessment of colour, texture, and translucency remains substantially a matter of expert judgement. This subjectivity, combined with the cultural specificity of demand — the market is overwhelmingly driven by buyers of Chinese heritage — means that jadeite prices can appear opaque or surprising to collectors more familiar with the sapphire and ruby markets.

The Doubly Fortunate result helped to crystallise, for a global auction audience, precisely how high that market had risen. At approximately US$1 million per carat across the pair, the earrings placed imperial jadeite in direct comparison with the finest Burmese rubies and Colombian emeralds on a per-carat basis, a comparison that would have seemed improbable to Western gemstone markets a generation earlier.

Significance and Legacy

The Doubly Fortunate earrings occupy a particular place in the history of jadeite collecting for several reasons that extend beyond the auction record itself. First, they embody the full arc of imperial jadeite's twentieth-century journey: from the Burmese mines of Hpakant, through the lapidaries of Hong Kong and Guangzhou, into the collections of Western society figures who recognised their beauty without necessarily understanding their cultural context, and finally back to the Asian market that has always been their natural home. Second, their provenance through Hutton and Dyer connects the contemporary jadeite market to the broader history of twentieth-century jewel collecting, lending the stones a biographical richness that purely geological rarity cannot supply.

Third, and perhaps most significantly for the trade, the 2014 result provided a publicly documented benchmark for the value of matched imperial-green jadeite cabochons of approximately ten carats each — a benchmark that appraisers, insurers, and auction specialists have been able to reference in subsequent years. In a market where comparable sales data is often held privately, a transparent auction result of this magnitude performs an important price-discovery function.

The name Doubly Fortunate, chosen for the sale, has itself entered the vocabulary of jadeite collecting as a shorthand for the 2014 record, much as the Hutton-Mdivani necklace serves as a reference point for bead jadeite. Both pieces, in different ways, mark the outer boundaries of what the market has been willing to pay for imperial jadeite in the modern era — and both carry the name of Barbara Hutton as a connecting thread between the Western fascination with jade and the Chinese cultural tradition that created the standard by which such stones are judged.

Further Reading

• GIA Gems & Gemology — Jadeite Auction Records (2015)
• GIA — Jadeite Jade: What You Need to Know
• Lotus Gemology — Jadeite Grading