Gold Jewelry - Real or Fake?

Real or Fake - How to Know if Your Old Jewelry is Real

At first glance it’s very difficult to tell if pieces of vintage or well-worn jewelry are real gold or merely plated costume items of no actual metallic value. Although some costume jewelry is very valuable as collector items, sometimes more valuable than gold, that is a subject for another time. Today I will focus on how to get a good idea of the relative value of items without the use of expensive equipment or special expertise. I will use the qualifying words “usually”, “normally”, “sometimes”, etc., a lot because there is really no way of knowing FOR SURE without a real test made by an experienced technician.

First a few terms:

GOLD TONED: No gold whatsoever in the item. Just gold colored.

GOLD PLATED/WASHED/GP: Base metal (copper, brass, pot metal) with a very thin electrically deposited gold coating, sometimes as thin as a few atoms of real gold. It is essentially worthless for its gold content.

HGE: “Heavy Gold Electroplate”. Same as above, but sometimes with a little more gold.

GOLD FILLED: By law in the US “gold filled” must have at least twenty percent actual gold content. This is really pretty good, and it usually wears and looks like karat gold, but because it is eighty percent base metals it is usually of no interest to a gold buyer or refiner unless they can get many pounds at a time.

KARAT GOLD: “Karat” means the percentage of gold in an item. It is not plated but is the same metallic content throughout. In the US karat values run from 8K (.333 or 33.3%) through 18K (.750 or 75.0% gold). A few might be higher, but by law anything below 8K cannot be called “karat gold”.

SOLID GOLD: This term does not indicate value or content but merely says it is the same content throughout the piece. “Solid” is a bit confusing because, like karat gold, it may indeed be hollow.

Next we’ll explore some of the simple indicators which can give at least some idea if a piece is actually gold or base metals.