Most people, if they've heard of Whitby jet at all, know it as the black stuff in Victorian mourning jewellery. Queen Victoria wore it after Albert died. It's associated with grief and with a particular kind of Gothic Englishness — something dark and northern and old. What most people don't know is that a significant proportion of what gets sold as Whitby jet is not Whitby jet. It's something else. And that distinction matters more than you'd think.

Genuine Whitby jet is fossilised araucaria wood, roughly 182 million years old, found in specific geological seams along the Yorkshire coast. It's warm to the touch, lighter than it looks, and takes a very particular kind of polish — deep and slightly greasy, the way old lacquer looks. It's also rare. The seams are finite. The skilled craftspeople who know how to work it are fewer every decade. A good piece, made well, by someone who knows what they're doing, is a beautiful thing. I find it genuinely beautiful, the way I find old instruments and hand-cut joinery beautiful: something about knowing the material has limits.

The problem is that anthracite, cannel coal, vulcanite, French jet (which is glass), and various plastic composites can all be made to look similar, especially in a photograph, especially at tourist-shop prices. This creates real harm — not dramatic harm, but the slow erosive kind. Buyers pay genuine-jet prices for substitutes. Legitimate craftspeople lose trade to people who aren't playing by the same rules. The provenance of a regional craft tradition gets muddied. Nobody's being robbed at gunpoint, but it's not nothing either.

The research question I've been interested in is this: can you build a reliable identification system that works from images and material properties, without requiring a lab? The short answer is that it's harder than it looks, and more interesting than it sounds.

The platform I've been developing — authenticwhitbyjet.co.uk — is a proof-of-concept, not a finished product. I want to be straightforward about that. It's independent research, pro bono, and it's at the stage where the interesting problems are still being properly defined rather than solved. Which is actually my favourite stage of any project, even though it's the most uncomfortable one. You know enough to know you don't know enough, and the shape of what you don't know is finally starting to become visible.

The interesting sub-problems turn out to include: how to build a reference dataset when genuine examples are not uniformly documented; how to handle the fact that jet weathers and ages differently depending on how it's been stored; and how to design something that a craftsperson or a buyer could actually use, rather than something that works in a controlled setting and nowhere else.

There's also a heritage angle that I find genuinely motivating. Whitby jet carving is a centuries-old trade with a documented history going back to the Bronze Age — jet beads have been found in burial sites across the north of England. The Victorian boom turned it into an industry. The decline after the First World War nearly killed it. What survives now is fragile. If you care about that kind of thing — regional craft knowledge, the accumulated skill of a specific place and material — then getting the identification question right feels like it matters. Not in a grand way. In the quiet way that something matters when you think it's worth preserving.

I grew up in this part of the world. I know what it looks like. I know the particular quality of light on the coast on a November afternoon, the way the stone and the sea look like they belong to each other. That's not a research credential and I'm not pretending it is. But it does explain why this particular niche caught me and hasn't let go.

The work continues. Slowly, carefully, without a budget or a deadline. That's fine. Some things are worth doing slowly.