The price of silver is on an upward curve at the time of writing, and if you’ve got a bit of money to spare, you might be considering buying some sterling silver as an investment. However, it does pay to be careful – not everything sold as “silver” is sterling silver, as you will see.
So, when is sterling silver not actually sterling silver at all, but something else?
1. When it’s a different grade of silver to sterling. Sterling silver contains 925 parts of silver per thousand – or 92.5% silver in percentage terms. But you can get other grades of silver, including:
800 – 800 parts per thousand, or 80%
835 – 835 parts per thousand, or 83.5%
900 – 900 parts per thousand, or 90%
and higher grades than sterling, e.g. 950 (950 parts per thousand, or 95%)
2. When it’s alpaca. A lot of people who sell jewellery on the Internet describe stuff that’s marked with the word “alpaca” as silver. It isn’t – alpaca is an alloy of copper, nickel, zinc and other metals. Alpaca goes by a multitude of other names including nickel silver and German silver.
3. When it’s Tibetan silver. In theory, Tibetan silver is just what it says on the tin – real silver that happens to come from Tibet. But nowadays, a lot of jewellery and findings sold as “Tibetan silver” have no silver content whatsoever. In fact, tests have shown that some of them contain appreciable amounts of lead and even arsenic!
4. When it’s silver plated. A lot of vintage silver plate items are stamped with letters and pictorial markings that look like the hallmarks you get on genuine silver. A common such marking is the abbreviation EPNS, which stands for Electroplated Nickel Silver. Sometimes unmarked items will test as silver, even when they’re just plated – this isn’t necessarily because the person doing the testing has tried to con you, they just didn’t go deep enough into the metal when they did the test! I have been caught out this way a couple of times when buying silver online, so my policy now is to only buy things that are actually marked for silver.
© The Silver Snake May 2011
Links
Silver Salon forums alpaca thread
An eBay guide to things you didn’t know about Tibetan silver