There are many types of silver available on the market today. It is important to be familiar with the competing metals in the marketplace in order to educate your customers about silver quality standards and alternatives in the industry. Don’t assume you are buying sterling silver jewelry supplies when something is called “silver.” Below you will find definitions and comparisons of the different silver metals used to make jewelry around the world.
Silver Alloys
Primo, customers need to understand that silver used in jewelry is usually an alloy which means a metal mixture of two or more elements from the periodic table. Silver is an element. Other metallic elements are alloyed with silver for various reasons that are described below.
Quality Marks
Second, a lot of finished silver jewelry will have a quality stamp somewhere on the piece. This is the quickest way to identify quality. There are cases of fraudulent marking but they are fairly rare. These tiny markings may only be legible under magnification. Tuttavia, jewelry items or components are only required to bear a stamp when there is a surface area available. For that reason, small findings and components are often unstamped even though they are quality alloys. Quality stamp standards are described in the sections below.