Karat marks and their numbers.
Pure gold is 24 karat. Everything else is gold alloyed with other metals for strength and colour. American pieces usually carry the karat number, European pieces carry the parts-per-thousand version. They mean the same thing.
24k
- Euro mark
- 999
- Pure gold
- 99.9%
- Where you see it
- Bullion. Too soft for daily wear.
22k
- Euro mark
- 916
- Pure gold
- 91.7%
- Where you see it
- Indian and Middle Eastern jewelry, some coins.
18k
- Euro mark
- 750
- Pure gold
- 75%
- Where you see it
- Fine and designer jewelry. Cartier, Tiffany, most Swiss watch cases.
14k
- Euro mark
- 585
- Pure gold
- 58.5%
- Where you see it
- The American default. Most chains, most engagement rings.
10k
- Euro mark
- 417
- Pure gold
- 41.7%
- Where you see it
- The legal floor to be called gold in the US. Class rings, budget chains.
9k
- Euro mark
- 375
- Pure gold
- 37.5%
- Where you see it
- British and Australian. Not sellable as gold in the US.
Marks that mean it is not solid.
These are the stamps that turn a hopeful visit into a short one. They all describe a coating over a base metal, and none of them are bought by weight the way solid gold is.
GP · GEP · HGE · HGP
- What it means
- Gold plated, or heavy gold electroplate. Microns thick.
GF · 14K GF · 1/20 12K GF
- What it means
- Gold filled. A bonded layer, thicker than plate. The fraction is the gold weight ratio.
RGP · 1/10 10K RGP
- What it means
- Rolled gold plate. Thinner than gold filled.
GOLD TONE · GOLD FINISH
- What it means
- Marketing. No meaningful gold.
925 with a gold colour
- What it means
- Gold plated sterling, sometimes sold as vermeil. The silver is real, the gold is a coating.
The tell that catches most people: a stamp reading 14K GF is not 14k gold. The two letters after the karat number change everything, and they are usually the smallest characters on the piece.
When the stamp itself is a lie.
A stamp is just metal pressed into metal, and it can be faked. Real karat marks are crisp and evenly struck, usually alongside a maker's mark. Fakes are often soft, shallow, oddly spaced, or sitting alone with no other marks anywhere on the piece.
- 01
Look for wear at the contact points
Clasp, the underside of a ring shank, the edge of a bezel. Plating over base metal goes pink or grey exactly where a piece rubs.
- 02
Check the weight in your hand
Gold is dense. A solid 14k chain feels startlingly heavy for its size, and a plated one feels like nothing.
- 03
Watch for discolouration on skin
Solid gold does not turn skin green. That is copper in a base alloy reacting with sweat.
- 04
Be suspicious of a lone stamp
Genuine manufactured jewelry almost always carries a maker's mark or a country of origin beside the karat mark.
None of that is conclusive. An XRF analyser reads the actual alloy through the surface in seconds without marking the piece, and that is what settles it. You watch the number come up.
Weight, purity, then everything else.
Scrap gold value is straightforward: weight times purity against the spot price. That is the floor, and it applies to broken chains, single earrings and tangled lots just the same as clean pieces.
What lifts a piece above that floor is everything a scale cannot read.
- A designer signature: Cartier, Van Cleef, Tiffany, David Yurman, Bulgari
- Original stones, particularly diamonds over roughly half a carat
- Period pieces with intact hallmarks and no repairs
- Gold watch cases where the movement matters more than the metal
- Coins with numismatic value, which can be many times melt
This is the single most common way people lose money on gold: sending a signed or antique piece to a mail-in refiner, who pays melt because melt is all they can assess from a photograph.