Cinnabar, mercury, and how to read a safety report

Cinnabar is mercury sulfide. That sentence is the beginning of every honest conversation about it, and the reason we do not sell cinnabar to be worn against the skin.

The European Union restricts mercury in jewellery to zero. That is not a threshold to be approached — it is a prohibition. In the United States the picture is different but not permissive: California Proposition 65 requires a warning, and the CPSC bars cinnabar in items children may mouth.

Our approach is to seal the material. The cinnabar beads in our bracelets sit inside a silver cage, so the surface a hand touches is silver. The piece is a display object, and we say so on the product page.

Every piece ships with an ISO 17025 heavy-metal assay whose report number is printed on the page. Read the number, ask us for the report, and check what was tested: mercury content, lead and cadmium migration, nickel release. If a seller cannot give you that, they do not know what they are shipping.