Why 925

Almost everyone has owned a silver chain that stopped being silver. It looked right for about a month. Then the shine went patchy around the clasp, the raised edges of the links turned a dull yellow, and a warmer colour started showing through at the points where metal rubbed metal. By the time it left a mark on the skin, the piece had been finished for weeks.

That chain was plated. What follows is an explanation of why that matters, written in enough detail that you can open any listing from any seller and work out what you are being sold. It covers what the 925 stamp actually refers to, why solid silver darkens and why that is a good sign rather than a fault, and what a green mark on skin is really made of. There is also a section on how to test a piece yourself, which applies to us as much as to anyone else.

What the 925 stamp means

Pure silver is too soft to wear. A chain made from it would stretch under its own weight, and the links would go out of shape in your hand without much effort. So silver is alloyed with a harder metal for strength, and the ratio that became the international standard for sterling is 92.5 per cent silver to 7.5 per cent other metal, most often copper. That figure is where the 925 stamp comes from.

Solid 925 means the entire object is that alloy. There is no core of anything else inside it, no layer, no coating. Cut a solid sterling chain through the middle and the exposed face looks like the outside, because there is nothing in there but sterling.

Everything CRESTSIDE lists is solid. Nothing is plated and nothing is filled.

Silver plated, and the expiry date nobody prints on it

Plated jewellery begins as a base metal. Brass and copper alloys are the usual choices, sometimes steel, and the finished shape is dipped in a bath where an electrical current lays a skin of silver over the outside. That skin is measured in microns, and a micron is one thousandth of a millimetre. Plating thickness varies enormously between makers, and at the cheap end of costume jewellery it can sit under a single micron.

Wear takes it off. The collar of a shirt, a watch strap, sweat, a sleeve dragging across a bracelet every time you reach for something. None of that is mistreatment. It is ordinary use, and it removes a layer measured in thousandths of a millimetre on a timetable you have no way of slowing down. Polishing makes it worse, because polishing works by removing surface material and on a plated piece the surface is the only silver present.

Once the layer is through, base metal is sitting against your skin. Nothing brings it back except having the piece re-plated, which is a job you pay a jeweller to do and which starts the same clock again from the beginning.

Where the green actually comes from

The green is a copper reaction. Copper compounds form on a metal surface where copper meets sweat and air over time, and those compounds transfer onto skin. The colour is copper salts. It is not dangerous, and it washes off with soap.

On a plated piece this is close to inevitable, because the base metal underneath is usually a copper alloy and it is only a matter of time before wear exposes it. A green ring on the neck or wrist is the piece telling you the silver has gone.

Solid sterling deserves an honest answer here rather than a marketing one. Sterling contains 7.5 per cent copper, so it is not chemically impossible for a solid 925 piece to leave a faint mark on somebody, particularly in humid weather or where sunscreen and hand cream sit trapped under the metal all day. It is uncommon. What matters is the difference in what the mark means.

On sterling it is a surface reaction. It washes off the skin, it lifts off the metal with a cloth, and the piece underneath is unchanged. On plated jewellery the same colour is structural failure, and no amount of washing puts the silver back.

Yes, solid 925 sterling silver tarnishes

Tarnish is the most misunderstood thing about sterling silver, and it is worth being precise about, because a lot of people watch a chain go dark and quietly conclude they were sold a fake.

Silver reacts with sulphur compounds in the air. The product of that reaction is silver sulphide, a dark layer that forms on the outside of the metal and goes no deeper than the outside. It arrives in stages you can watch. A faint yellow cast first, then a warmer brown, then something close to black in the recesses of a link where no cloth has ever reached. Coastal air, gas heating, wool, rubber bands and certain cardboards all speed it up, because every one of them puts sulphur near the metal.

A silver polishing cloth removes it. The cloth carries a very mild abrasive and an anti-tarnish agent, and on a bracelet that has darkened over a few months you are looking at well under a minute of work. The metal comes back to where it started, because nothing was lost in the first place. It will tarnish again. You will clean it again. That cycle can run for as long as you own the piece, and there is no point along it where the silver runs out.

Plated jewellery does not behave this way, and the difference is the most reliable diagnosis you will get. A plated piece does not darken evenly and then return. It goes patchy first, and then it flakes, and what shows underneath is a different colour to what you bought.

Worth noting in the other direction as well: a piece sold as sterling that never changes at all after a year of regular wear is also worth a question. It may be sealed under a lacquer or a rhodium layer, which is not dishonest in itself, but it does mean the surface you are touching is not silver.

925 sterling silver against silver plated

Set side by side, the practical differences come down to five things.

Composition. Sterling is 92.5 per cent silver the whole way through. Plated is base metal with a silver skin on the outside, frequently thinner than a tenth of a millimetre.
Weight. Silver is dense, at 10.49 grams per cubic centimetre. Brass sits around 8.5 and steel around 7.9. Two chains of identical design and size will not weigh the same, and the sterling one is the heavier of the two.
Ageing. Sterling darkens evenly and comes back with a cloth, for decades. Plating thins, breaks up, and exposes what was always underneath it.
Repair. A sterling chain can be soldered, shortened, lengthened and re-polished by any jeweller in the country. A plated piece generally cannot be worked on without destroying the finish, which is why most of them are thrown out instead of fixed.
Cost. Sterling costs more at the counter. Plated costs less at the counter, and then again each time it is replaced.

How to check silver before you buy it, including from us

None of this needs equipment you do not already own. Run it on us as readily as on anybody else.

Find the stamp. Sterling is marked 925 somewhere discreet: on the clasp, on a small tag beside it, on the inside of a band, or on the back of a pendant. Understand what the stamp is, though. It is a declaration made by whoever produced the piece, not an independent test, so treat it as the start of the question rather than the answer to it.
Ask for the weight in grams. A seller who can tell you a bracelet is 45.6 grams has physically weighed it. A seller who will only describe it as heavy either has not, or would rather you did not know.
Read what the listing avoids saying. "Silver tone", "silver finish", "silver colour", "925 plated", "sterling silver plated" and "silver filled" are all ways of saying the piece is not solid sterling. Those phrases are chosen with care by people who do not want to lie in writing.
Weigh the description against the size. A 22 inch curb chain in solid silver with wide flat links is a heavy object to pick up. If the same chain arrives light enough to forget about, the density is wrong and the metal is not what you were told.
Try a magnet. Silver is not attracted to magnets. If a piece pulls towards one, there is steel inside it and the conversation is over. Passing proves less than people assume, because brass and copper are not magnetic either, so use this to rule pieces out rather than to rule them in.
Watch how it ages. Six months of ordinary wear settles the question on its own. Even darkening that lifts off with a cloth is sterling doing exactly what sterling does. Patchy loss with another colour underneath is plating coming to the end of it.

The tests that will not tell you much

There is a great deal of advice online that sounds decisive and is not.

The ring test. Silver does have a distinctive high note when struck, but chain and link shapes damp it out almost completely, and judging pitch by ear against a metal you have never heard cleanly is guesswork.
The ice test. Silver conducts heat better than any other metal, so ice genuinely does melt faster on it. The effect is easy to see on a flat solid surface and close to invisible on a chain, where there is not enough contact area for it to show.
The bleach test. Bleach does blacken silver within seconds. It also blackens a good deal of base metal, so you have put a corrosive on your jewellery in exchange for an inconclusive result.
Acid testing. This one works, and jewellers use it daily. It also requires scratching the piece deeply enough to expose the metal below the surface, which is why it belongs to a valuer rather than to you and a chain you have owned for a week.

What happens here before a piece is listed

Each CRESTSIDE piece arrives stamped 925 by the maker, and as covered above, a stamp is a claim rather than a guarantee. So every piece is torch-verified by hand in Melbourne before it goes on the site. Held to a flame, plated metal discolours almost immediately, because the layer is thin enough that the base metal beneath it reacts through the surface. Solid sterling comes through the same flame looking the way it did going in.

That check is run on the individual piece rather than on one sample pulled from a batch, which matters most on the pieces where only one exists.

Weight in grams is published on every product page beside the price, along with the length measured end to end with the clasp included, the link style, and how many of that piece were made. Those figures are taken from the pieces themselves. Across the current six, they run from 21.5 grams for the Mamba Chain up to 75 grams for the Nocturne Lock Chain.

Looking after solid silver

Sterling is not fragile, and the routine is short.

Put it on last, after sunscreen and aftershave have dried. Those products settle into the recesses of a link and hold moisture against the metal.
Take it off before swimming. Chlorine and salt water both accelerate tarnish, and chlorine in particular goes after the copper in the alloy.
Wipe it with a soft dry cloth when you take it off at night. This single step does most of the work, because it lifts sweat off the metal instead of leaving it there for eight hours.
Store it dry and closed, ideally in the box it arrived in. A closed box does considerably more than an open drawer, given that wool and rubber both give off sulphur.
When it dulls, reach for a silver polishing cloth rather than toothpaste or a household abrasive. A cloth is built for the job and will not put fine scratches through a mirror polish.

Left in its box between wears, a solid silver chain still tarnishes eventually, only slowly. Worn every day it will tarnish faster, and it will also stay brighter along the high points, because skin and fabric polish the metal as they pass over it. Both are normal. Neither is damage.

If something here is still unclear

Questions about sizing, or about anything on this page, are answered by a person rather than a form. Email crestsidejwl@gmail.com.

Every piece in the current drop is listed with its weight and its measured length, so you can check the claims on this page against the ones on the product pages. See the six pieces.