Handmade jewelry market is diverse and unregulated. Though hallmarking is obligatory in some countries, many handmade jewelry pieces sold as “sterling” and\/or “silver” do not bear the hallmark. How can you be sure that the metal is silver (of a certain grade)? If you are both a buyer and a seller on etsy.com<\/a>, this is very important that no one is misled. Neither you nor you customers.<\/p>\n My good friend who also owns a\u00a0shop on etsy<\/a>\u00a0has purchased a pair of earrings from another etsy shop and wanted to have them tested. We decided to make a short movie featuring our home experiment: testing silver with acid.<\/p>\n In this post<\/a>\u00a0I wrote that there is a special testing fluid based on sulphuric acid<\/a>\u00a0which provides quite reliable results in telling whether the item is silver or not. Normally if the silver content is > 70% the droplet reacts by leaving a red-brownish spot on the metal. But our question was: does the color of the spot distinguish between different silver grades\/ % of silver in the alloy? As we know silver can have different purity<\/a>. We also wanted to know whether other sulphuric compounds such as liver of sulfur<\/a> can be used for testing different grades of silver. We tested pieces with\u00a03 different silver percentages (835, 925 and 999), as well as a ring which we knew it was not silver (“melchior”).<\/p>\n Watch this video to see the procedure and the conclusions of the test.<\/p>\n