mdolla: Try This Simple Test to Evaluate the Quality of your Gold Jewellery

Gold is categorised as a heavy metal with unique properties. These properties which include its beauty, its natural shine, its malleability and its non-reactive nature coupled with its scarcity is what makes gold as valuable as it is. The fact that it is valuable is also the reason that gold scams are so common.

Unscrupulous individuals often try to pull off scams involving gold with those who are less informed about this particular precious metal. Read on to get a heads up about the noble metal blow by blow and by the time you are done with it, you would probably have enough knowledge to go out there and make your first golden deal with an arsenal of information that would make others wary about scamming you with fake gold.

The Basics

Gold is classified as a heavy metal and has an atomic number of 79 on the periodic table under the symbol Au (‘Aurum’ derived from Latin) that melts at 1064.18 degrees Celsius and boils at 2970 degrees Celsius. Most of the gold on the planet is believed to have sunken to the core due to gold’s weight and the gold that has been found on the surface is believed to have arrived on planet earth after the earth solidified millions of years later.

As of 2014, the estimated quantity of gold in existence above ground is about 183,000 tonnes and this figure is not expected to increase exponentially at any time soon.

Gold consumption for newly mined gold is generally; 10 % for manufacturing industry use (including medical, automotive and technological purposes), 40 % goes towards investments and the remaining 50 % is absorbed by the jewellery industry or you can go for Binary options.

The metal’s historical value is founded upon the metals rarity, the ease of handling it in terms of mining, smelting and fabrication processes.

Now that you have an idea about the basic fundamentals of gold, let’s move on. Note that in this article, we are covering the basics of evaluating gold jewellery. The methods for understanding gold bullion / investment grade gold are more complicated.

Understanding the Karat system

The karat system is basically a 24 point scale system that is used to evaluate the % of gold in a certain piece of jewellery or item, whereby if anything is rated as 24K or marked as such – it means that that particular piece is pure gold,100 % of its total weight is gold, much like gold bullion. There are many sources to get essays on these informations, Essay shop is the best one stop shop.

Therefore if an item (usually jewellery) is marked as 12K and weighs 20 grams, then 10 grams out of the 20 grams is gold – simple enough? Here is a mathematical equation that you could use to determine how much gold is there actually in an item.

Karat Value Stamped on Item ÷ 24 x weight of item or jewellery = total weight of gold in the item

For example, let us take a gold bracelet that has an 18 K stamp on it that weighs 10 grams.

Using the formula you would get 18/24 x 10grams = 7.5 grams. That means that there is a total of 7.5 grams of gold in that 10 gram item. This formula is derived from Melbourne Gold Company.

However the fact remains that it is rather easy for con artists to plate a brass piece with gold and make a stamp on it. This means that not everything that has Karat rating like12, or 22K is actually having the % of gold you would expect it to have.

So how do you go about overcoming this problem? Use a test kit. Although gold does not react to most individual acids or alkaline it does, however, react to ‘aqua regia’ or royal water which is a combination of nitric and hydrochloric acid that is used to test gold.

These kits are available online for as little as 13 Dollars. It is relatively easy to use.

Testing Gold with a Precious Metals Test Kit – The Acid Test

Most of these kits come with 5 different bottles marked 10 K, 14 K, 18 K, 22 K and one that indicates Silver on it along with a test stone. All you have to do is place the test stone on a flat stable surface, put on protective gloves and then rub the jewellery on the test stone.

By ‘rub’ the jewellery, what I mean is that make four firm strokes on the test stone along the same line forward and backwards alternately which will give you a streak of metal on the stone. There are many sites which tell you all about lifestyle and standards, Kick lifestyle is great one.

Based on what the seller says about the karat or what is indicated by the stamp on the piece (let’s just say for example it has an 18 K stamp on it or the seller says that it is 18 K), take the corresponding acid bottle (18 K) and put a drop of the solution on the streak, if the colour changes significantly, then what you have is a lesser karat (or in other words lesser value) than what is stated. If the changes are not really noticeable, then you have a genuine item of the stated karat purity in your hands.

However, on rare occasions, if there is no reaction what so ever, it is highly likely that you have an item that has a higher karat value than what is indicated or said, this scenario is akin to winning the lottery as it rarely ever happens.

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