How to Tell If 925 Sterling Silver Is Real

A 925 stamp costs a forger nothing. It is a punch, and a punch can be pressed into plated brass as easily as into sterling silver. That is the awkward fact behind every piece of silver sold online, and it is worth knowing how to work around it before you spend $400 on a chain.

None of the checks below needs a laboratory. Three of them need nothing at all. The other two need an ice cube and a magnet. They will not give you a certificate, and the last section is honest about what they cannot tell you.

What 925 actually means

Sterling silver is 92.5 per cent silver. The other 7.5 per cent is another metal, usually copper, alloyed in to make the piece hard enough to hold a clasp and take a polish. That ratio is where the number comes from, and it has been the English standard since the twelfth century.

Pure silver, at 99.9 per cent, is too soft for jewellery. A pure silver chain would stretch and a pure silver clasp would not hold. So 925 is the working form of the metal, not a cheaper grade of it.

Silver plating is a different thing entirely. A plated piece is base metal, usually brass or copper, with a layer of silver deposited on the outside. That layer is often measured in microns. It wears through at the points that rub, and what is underneath does not come back.

The stamp, and why it is not proof

Solid sterling is stamped 925, sometimes written .925 or STG or STERLING. On a chain the stamp usually sits on the clasp or on a small tag beside it. On a bracelet it is often inside the band.

Find it first. A piece with no stamp at all is a bad sign. But a stamp is not evidence of what sits underneath it, because nothing physically prevents one being pressed into plated metal. Treat the stamp as the first question, not the answer.

Five checks you can do yourself

1. The magnet test

Silver is not magnetic. Copper is not magnetic either, which is why this test is often explained badly. What a magnet finds is iron, nickel and steel, the metals used in cheap cores. Hold a magnet against the piece. If it pulls, the piece is not solid silver.

Use the strongest magnet you can find. A rare-earth magnet costs a few dollars at a hardware shop and tells you more than a fridge one, because solid silver will slide slowly past it instead of sticking or ignoring it. That drag is an eddy current and you can see it happen. If the magnet does nothing at all, you have ruled out one family of fakes and nothing more.

2. The ice test

Silver carries heat better than any other metal, at 429 watts per metre kelvin. Put an ice cube on the piece and another on a coin or a plate. On solid silver the cube starts melting almost at once, visibly faster than on the other surface, even though both started at room temperature.

This one reads the bulk of the metal instead of the surface, so a few microns of plating cannot carry it. Brass conducts at roughly a quarter of the rate and fails clearly.

Copper is the exception and you should know about it. Copper carries heat slightly better than sterling silver does, so a copper-cored piece passes this test comfortably. Use it to catch brass and steel. Do not use it to clear a piece on its own.

3. The tarnish test

Silver tarnishes. It darkens with air and with skin, and on a piece worn daily you will see it inside a few weeks.

Where it darkens tells you more than how much. Sterling goes first in the places that hold moisture against the metal, so crevices, the insides of links and the seat around a stone darken before the flat faces do. All of it lifts off with a soft polishing cloth.

Plating fails in a different way. The wear shows on edges and high points where the layer is thinnest, and what appears there is a different colour instead of a darker version of the same one. Yellow or pink coming through means brass or copper underneath. Polishing will not bring the plating back.

One caution, because this test sends people to the wrong conclusion more than any other. A great deal of genuine sterling is finished with rhodium or a clear lacquer specifically so it will not tarnish, and those pieces stay bright for years. A piece that has not darkened is not automatically suspect.

4. The smell test

Rub the piece between your fingers for ten seconds and smell them. Silver is close to odourless. That familiar coin smell is not the metal at all. It is your own skin oils breaking down on contact with copper or iron, so a strong metallic smell points to a copper or brass core.

5. The sound test

Tap the piece with a fingernail or another metal object. Solid silver rings with a high clear note that carries for a second or two. Plated base metal gives a shorter, duller sound. This is the least reliable of the five on a chain, because the links damp the ring, but it works on a solid bracelet or a clasp.

What a torch test does

Heat is the check a jeweller reaches for, and it is the one CRESTSIDE runs on every piece before it goes on the site.

A brief flame darkens solid sterling as the copper in the alloy oxidises at the surface. Polish it and the piece comes back. Plated metal behaves differently under the same heat, because the base metal underneath discolours in its own way and a few microns of silver cannot hide it.

Do not try this on a piece you have paid for. You need a controlled flame and a safe surface to set the metal on. Silver holds heat long after the flame has gone, and the fumes off an unknown base metal are not something to stand over. This test belongs to whoever is selling the piece. The point of mentioning it is that you can ask whether it was done.

What none of this tells you

Here is the honest limit. Every check above tells you whether a piece is solid metal or plated base metal. None of them tells you the purity.

A piece could be solid silver at 800 or 900 parts per thousand rather than 925 and pass all five without trouble. The tests a jeweller runs across a counter are not conclusive on that point either. An acid comparison reads the surface and returns a rough band. X-ray fluorescence penetrates only micrometres, so a thick enough plating defeats it, which is exactly the fraud this page is about.

The method that settles purity is fire assay. A sample is melted, the base metals are absorbed away, and what remains is weighed. It is accurate to roughly one part in ten thousand, and it consumes the sample, which is why it belongs to assay offices and refiners instead of to shops.

Buying online

You cannot hold the piece, so the checks above only help after it arrives. Before that, what you have is what the seller is willing to state.

Ask for the stamp to be photographed. Ask what the piece weighs in grams, then compare that number against pieces of similar size elsewhere. Weight is the property that is hard to fake in the object, whatever the description says: sterling silver runs at 10.4 grams per cubic centimetre against roughly 8.5 for brass and 7.9 for steel, so a plated piece of the same dimensions arrives lighter. Ask where it was made. Ask what happens if it is not what was described.

A seller who answers all four plainly is telling you something, and so is one who does not.

Every CRESTSIDE piece is solid 925, stamped by the maker, and torch-tested by hand in Melbourne before it is listed. Weights are published on every product page, from 21.5 grams to 75 grams. If a piece is not what was described when it reaches you, the Refund Policy covers it, and your rights under the Australian Consumer Law apply to every order regardless.

The Why 925 page covers what sterling silver does over years of wear, and how solid silver compares to plated.