A product page is not a description. It is an argument, written by someone who would like you to buy the thing, and every word in it was chosen with that in mind — including ours.
That does not make it useless. It makes it a document with a bias, and documents with a bias can still be read for information as long as you know where to look. Here is where.
One: what is underneath
Find the base metal before you find anything else. Brass, copper, stainless steel, sterling silver — that single word decides more about how the piece will behave than any other on the page.
If you cannot find it, that is the answer. "Alloy", "metal alloy" and "mixed metal" are not materials. They are the phrase you reach for when you either do not know what you bought or would rather not say. A shop that knows its supply chain can name the metal, because someone in that chain named it to them.
Two: what is over it
This is the one almost nobody looks for, and it decides how long the piece keeps looking the way it does in the photograph.
A finish is a stack, not a coat. Under the visible layer there may be a hard underlayer that stops the softer metal above from moving; over it there may be a lacquer, so that the thing your sleeve rubs is not the precious layer at all. On white metals, rhodium does the same job from the other direction — it puts a non-reactive door between the air and the alloy.
So the useful question is not how thick is the plating. Thickness is the easy number to print. Ask what is underneath the outer layer, and whether anything is over it. A page that answers that has told you something a competitor's page has not.
Three: numbers where numbers belong
Adjectives are free. Numbers cost something, because a number can be checked and an adjective cannot.
Durable · long-lasting · premium quality · high polish — none of these commits anybody to anything. Millimetres, microns, karats, weights and lengths do. A page carrying real figures was written by someone who had the piece in their hand and a caliper nearby; a page of adjectives may have been written from a photograph.
You do not need to understand the figure for this to work. Its presence is the signal.
Four: the words that are not opinions
A handful of words on jewelry pages are legal measurements with thresholds attached, and they are the closest thing to a fixed point you get.
- Gold plated
- Has a minimum thickness of real gold set by regulation. Below it, the phrase may not be used at all.a threshold, not a style
- Gold filled
- A proportion of gold by weight of the whole piece, mechanically bonded rather than deposited.by weight
- Vermeil
- Requires both sterling silver underneath and a substantial gold layer above. Fail either half and the word is gone.two conditions
- Sterling · 925
- An alloy at least 92.5% silver. A claim about what is underneath, and never about the surface.92.5% minimum
- Gold-tone · silver-tone
- No threshold at all. Not dishonest — simply not claims, and reading them as claims is the mistake the whole category is built on.no threshold
A shop using the loose word where the strict one would be false is telling you the truth in the only way available to it. A shop using the strict word where it does not apply is doing something else.
The gold half of that table is taken apart at length in what the gold words actually mean, and the silver half in does sterling silver tarnish.
Five: the absences, which say the most
Everything above is about what is on the page. This one is about what is not, and it is the part that takes practice.
A page that gives you a stamp but never says what is over the metal. A page with five photographs and no dimensions. A page that describes the mood of a piece at length and its material in two words. A page where the title says one thing and the specification says another — sterling silver in the name, alloy in the details.
None of those is proof of anything. All of them are the same signal: the easy-to-write parts are finished and the checkable parts are not.
The thirty-second test
- Do the arithmetic. Precious metal has a market price anyone can look up. If a piece costs less than the metal it claims to contain, the claim is the thing that is wrong, not the bargain you found.
- Search the exact phrase. Copy a sentence from the description into a search engine. If forty listings return it word for word, nobody at that shop wrote it, and nobody there checked it either.
- Read the specification against the title. They are usually written by different people at different times. Where they disagree, the specification is more often the honest one, because the title was written to be found.
What a review can and cannot tell you
Reviews are the most useful thing on the page and the most commonly misread.
They are excellent on: fit, weight, whether it looks like the photograph, how quickly it arrived, and how the shop behaved when something went wrong. Those are things a wearer genuinely knows.
They are worthless on material. Nobody reviewing a necklace has assayed it. "Great quality, feels expensive" is a real impression and not evidence, and a hundred of them are not evidence either.
So read reviews for the experience and the seller, and read the specification for the metal. Using either one for the other's job is how people end up disappointed by something that was described accurately all along. How we collect ours is written down.
What is on ours
What we built · 31 August 2026
- 82sterling silver pieces
- 82whose page names the plating on its own line
- 1line, called Plating, sitting directly under Material
Method: we added it. Before that date our pages named the metal and left the plating to be inferred — exactly the absence described above. The line is not there because it looks thorough; it is there because we wrote an article telling people to look for it and could not then fail to have it.
We would rather be read this way than trusted blindly. If a page of ours ever fails one of the five tests above, it is a page we have not finished, and we would sooner you noticed than not.
The short version
Base metal. What is over it. Numbers rather than adjectives. Strict words used strictly. And then the gaps.
Five things, thirty seconds, and it works on any jewelry page on the internet, including ours.