Tag Archives: silver testing

Adventures in silver testing part 4: the Victorian charms

Years ago, I bought these charms in a charity shop for £20.00. They must be at least 120 years old, and some of them are really quite beautiful. I particularly like the big pipe with a man’s head as the bowl – he looks like an Easter Island statue.

I wondered if the charms might be silver, but there’s something about the lustre and patina that isn’t quite right for silver. The other day, I got the ol’ testing kit out and was totally unsurprised to find that it came up negative. I think the they’re made from some kind of lead alloy. And as they’ve been stored in a box for a long time without seeing the light of day, I am selling them on Etsy.

Adventures in silver testing part 3: the clear-out

Yesterday I had a huge sort-out of jewellery items that I’d acquired over the last few years – mostly in charity shops, but some on eBay – the low-priced items with blurry photos, listed late at night or early in the morning, which I considered were worth a gamble in the hope that they might be made of silver. Some of them actually were made of silver, but some of them failed the test that I subjected them to last night.

So all of this little lot (see below) has gone to one of my local charity shops. There are some perfectly nice pieces of jewellery in there, and also some silver-plated spoons. It leaves me with a (slightly) tidier work room and I’ve also come up with better system for sorting stuff out before selling. There’s now a clear plastic bag labelled “To be tested”, another bag labelled “To be repaired”, and another one labelled “Ready to be listed”. So now I can do a batch testing session, having donned the latex gloves that are next on my shopping list (‘cos silver testing solution is very allergenic and shouldn’t be allowed to come in contact with your skin).

Adventures in silver testing part 2: the bangle



I didn’t even need to get my testing kit out for this one. Well, I did need the file but the silver testing solution proved to be unnecessary. This piece of “silver” jewellery was £5 in one of my local charity shops. The shop thought it was silver and was selling it as such, but I wasn’t sure. Still, £5 isn’t much and even if my buy turned out to be rubbish, I was still helping the Pilgrim’s Hospice.

I got the bangle home and rubbed it with the file, only to find that underneath the thin plating of silver, it was made of purest copper:

You can’t win ’em all, I suppose.

Adventures in silver testing: the “Tiffany” necklace



I finally did something I’d been meaning to do for ages… bought a precious metals testing kit. It came from a British company called Caratest, who sell their kits through eBay and Amazon (and also on their own site, www.caratest.com, which seems to be down at the time of writing).

It consists of:

1. Three vials of liquid – one for testing silver, one to test for 9 carat gold and one to test for higher gold purities.
2. A file, to rub any silver or gold plating off an item to give a small exposed area for testing. Obviously you need to use as obscure a part of your item as possible, so that the filed area doesn’t show. The testing itself also leaves a mark, as you will see below.
3. A magnet. It was tiny and I’ve already lost it, so it’s not shown in the pic.
4. A touchstone. Used to test for gold when you’ve got items that are too small or fragile to use a file on. You rub the article you’re testing on the touchstone to produce a streak. Then produce a second streak with an item of known gold purity. (You can actually buy little pointy pieces of gold of 9, 14, 18 & 22 carat purity to use as “controls”. I may well invest in these one day.)
5. An instruction leaflet. Vital for a noob like me. Has a handy colour guide to show what type of results to expect depending on whether your charity shop find is in fact real precious metal or just faking it.

On to the testing. I have several “might be silver” items in my vaults, one of which was a necklace that purported to be made by Tiffany from sterling silver. Sadly, it was not:

You can see the greenish bit on the edge of the heart, near the top. That’s where I filed a small spot. Surrounding it is an area of pinky red where the silver plating gave a false positive result.