Sterling Silver Hallmarks and Craft: How to Tell Sterling From Silver Plate

What to take away

What a sterling mark legally means

A stamp of 925 means the alloy is at least 92.5 percent silver by weight, and the word sterling carries the same floor. Silver hallmarks like these are legal claims, not opinions about quality. The National Stamping Act makes it unlawful to stamp a gold or silver article with a false or misleading quality mark, and 15 U.S.C. § 294 sets out what the quality words mean.

Anything below that figure is plate, filled metal or a base alloy with a wash. The route from alloy to a stamped object is covered in how silver jewelry is made.

Reading a maker's mark with no assay office

Britain still sends silver to an assay office, which tests the metal and strikes a full hallmark. A full British hallmark has four parts: the standard mark, the maker's mark, the assay office mark and a date letter.

The standard mark for sterling is the lion passant, while the figure of Britannia marks the higher Britannia standard. Each assay office has its own symbol: the leopard's head for London, the anchor for Birmingham, the rose for Sheffield and the castle for Edinburgh.

The date letter changes every year and every office runs its own cycle, so dating a piece means checking that office's letter table. For about a century a fifth mark, the duty mark — the sovereign's head — showed that the tax on the piece had been paid.

The United States has no such system, so a US piece often carries only a quality mark and a name. Gorham, Tiffany & Co. and Reed & Barton are among the houses most often seen on American sterling, and their punches changed shape over the decades. Font, spacing and the shape of the punch are the evidence, and silver hallmarks sets out the international systems for comparison. On a US piece the stamp is the whole record.

Punches wear and get recut, so two pieces from one workshop can carry slightly different stamps. A plain sans-serif stamp often points to a later date than a serif stamp cut on the same bench.

A maker's mark is not a trademark, and a retailer's stamp is not a maker's mark. Both appear on silver, and only one points to the bench. The order to follow when a punch is worn or partly struck is in how to read a US maker's mark.

How a cast silver piece reaches its finish

Casting leaves a rough object, and the mold line shows on the sprue stub. Nearly everything a buyer reads as craft happens after the metal leaves the mold.

A bench that skips an intermediate grit leaves scratches that only show under a light held at an angle. They rarely show in a shop window at all.

Sterling carries one defect of its own: firestain, a copper oxide that rises during heating. Firestain and porosity explains why those two decide whether a piece polishes to a bright finish or stays textured.

Solid, plated, or filled: telling them apart

Three constructions share a shine and little else. The mark usually says which one you have; the color at the worn high points and the weight in the hand are the next clues.

Federal trade rules give the marking requirements teeth, and 16 CFR Part 23 governs quality marks for precious metals.

Plate and filled pieces carry their own vocabulary. EP and EPNS both mean electroplated, with EPNS naming nickel silver as the base, and EPBM is electroplated Britannia metal. A1 and quadruple plate were American trade claims for a heavier silver layer, and none of those marks says anything about the body underneath.

A magnet proves nothing. It grips a plated steel core and falls away from a plated zinc one.

Weight is the quicker test. Plate feels light for its size and often shows the base color at high points. The checks that matter before you pay are in buying real sterling silver online.

With no readable mark, no eye test settles the question. A jeweler's acid test or an XRF scan reads the alloy itself and separates sterling from plated brass or nickel silver. Both are worth asking for before money changes hands on an unmarked piece.

Cleaning silver without polishing metal away

Tarnish is silver sulfide on the surface. Warm water, mild soap and a soft cloth take it off, and so does a dip that converts the sulfide back to silver.

Abrasive paste and repeated machine polishing remove metal instead. Each pass flattens engraving, rounds prongs and thins a hollow handle wall. On an old piece the dark recesses are part of the design, not dirt.

Chlorine attacks some silver alloys, toothpaste is an abrasive, and an ultrasonic tank can loosen a setting or crack a filled stone.

Store pieces apart and dry, in a pouch or a closed box with anti-tarnish paper. Humidity does more damage in a year than wear does. A silver chain stored loose with other pieces scratches every link it touches.

Before cleaning an inherited piece, record the marks and the material first, as tracing an inherited silver object sets out.

Common questions