Beads of Bali

As you gain experience working with silver, you will come to develop an ability to know if someone is trying to sell you a false bill of goods.  Your own senses can be put to use to identify fake silver.

Your Eyes

If you have been working with sterling for any length of time, you may already have the experience necessary to identify fake silver by visual inspection alone. If you are new to beading, buy quality sterling from a reputable source and study it carefully with the naked eye and a magnifying glass.  Once you understand what silver looks like, go out into the marketplace. Look closely at the luster of the jewelry available.  Is the sheen too bright? Is it too cloudy, dull, or grey?  If so, don't buy. (In our experience, Indian-made Bali-style beads are often low in silver content and will have a dull finish that gives it away.)

Next, look at any item you are considering under a magnifying glass to determine if the surface has been plated. Dishonest suppliers of some companies plate base metal, which will give it the correct luster. However, with a sharp magnifying glass you may be able to detect spots of uneven plating, flaking, or even crevices where plating did not take hold. There is nothing wrong with silver-plated beads, findings and finished jewelry. What is wrong is the misrepresentation of silver-plated items as solid sterling.

Visual inspection will not tell you for sure that the item is sterling. However, no item should ever be purchased if it just does not look right. That said, we would note that our nephew does seem to be able to identify silver content by inspection alone. He has been making silver jewelry since he was a teenager, learning the craft from two uncles. Indeed, he mixed the sterling silver alloy of every item we produced when we were bead merchants. Through his experience he has become like a human X-Ray Fluorescence Analysis machine. He can easily detect items with low silver content and intuitively knows the silver content of other people's jewelry. If you have been making jewelry for some time, you may have developed similar abilities.

Your Hands (Weight Assessment)

Different metals have different weights. Take time to play with sterling silver beads and findings bought from a reputable company. Feel the weight of each item and study it, relative to its size.  Compare the weight of those items with similar ones made of plated copper or brass.  In the future, if an item feels too light, treat that as a red flag.

Silver is considerably heavier than the elements most likely to be used in fake silver, namely copper, nickel, tin and zinc. Scientists measure the mass of items using kilograms per cubic meter (kg/cu.m). Water, which has a kg/cu.m of 1000, is used as the baseline.  Here are the kg/cu.m values of common metals and the more expensive precious metals:

aluminum:   2640
zinc:   7135
tin:   7280
nickel:   8800
copper:   8930
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silver:   10,490
gold:   19,320
platinum:   21,400

The Ping Test

Silver, when struck with silver, makes a unique "ping" sound. The ping test is somewhat subjective, of course. The sound you hear is affected by the size and shape of the items being struck together. It works better for coins that beads and findings, but if you have two larger beads of findings (such as large, smooth toggles), it may work. The ping test is not suitable for small items. Banging two spacer beads together won't tell you much, for example.