Our metals

Two questions get confused in this trade, and the confusion is where most of the misleading happens. What is it made of is one question. What colour is it is a different one. A piece can be solid silver and look gold; a piece can look silver and have no silver in it anywhere.

So we answer them separately, and we answer both on every product page.

Sterling silver 925 — more than half the shop

Solid, not a colour over something else: the metal goes all the way through and it is stamped. There is no plating to wear off, no threshold to argue about, and nothing we have to be careful how we word.

What it does instead is tarnish — slowly, reversibly, and less the more you wear it. A soft cloth brings it back in a minute. We wrote that one out properly.

Three things can sit on top of it, and the product page names which. Rhodium on most of them, which keeps the silver bright and slows the tarnish right down; where that layer eventually wears, the same cloth brings the silver underneath back. Gold-tone on a handful — silver underneath, warm on the surface, honestly both things at once. And on a few, nothing at all: bare 925, behaving like bare 925.

See the sterling silver.

The rest — plated, and what that actually means

A surface of real metal laid over a base: refined copper, brass, or stainless steel. That is an ordinary and honest way to make jewelry at this price, and it is what nearly everyone at this price is doing. The difference is only whether they tell you.

Here is the part almost nobody advertises, because it does not fit on a label. It is not the thickness of the gold that decides how long a colour lasts. It is what the gold is lying on, and whether anything is over it. Gold is soft at every thickness. A thick layer over a soft base moves with the base and wears through where a finger rests. A hard underlayer leaves nothing to give; a clear coat on top means your sleeve never touches the gold at all.

We buy three constructions, and each is chosen for the design rather than the other way round.

• Refined copper, in layers. A refined copper base, a white-copper underlay, real 24K gold at 0.05 microns, and a clear electrophoretic lacquer over all of it. The lacquer is why these wear the way they do — the gold is protected rather than exposed.
• Steel with a titanium underlayer. Stainless beneath, titanium nitride over it — the same family of coating that goes on drill bits — then real 18K gold laid down in a furnace under vacuum, at 0.03 microns. These do not bend. We scraped them ourselves to find out what they take.
• Gold-tone over sterling silver. A real silver base, which is the best base there is.

Every piece names its own construction on its own page, with the thickness in microns wherever there is plating to measure. Not most of them — every one. The figure is measured rather than rounded, and it is the number almost nobody at this price prints at all.

It will get more precise from here, not less. As we reorder pieces with our own mark on them and a heavier layer, we will have more to say about how they are made, and we will say it in the same place. The words themselves are explained here.

The words we do not use, and what that costs

The US Federal Trade Commission reserves gold plated, gold filled and vermeil for particular thicknesses. Ours do not reach them, so we do not use those words — not one of them, not once. We say gold-tone, which describes a colour and promises nothing it cannot keep.

That reads weaker than what the shop beside us has written, and we know it. A seller who measures and then writes the true, weaker-sounding thing looks worse on the page than one who wrote whatever sold. We would still rather you opened the parcel and found we had not rounded in our own favour.

So: colour, or material?

Both, and they are two doors into the same shop rather than two halves of it.

• Gold-tone — everything that reads warm, whatever is underneath it, including the silver pieces that carry gold on top.
• Silver-tone — everything that reads cool. Most of it is the real thing.
• Sterling silver 925 — the material rather than the colour. This is the door to use if solid silver is what you came for.

Looking after any of it is the same short ritual: perfume and cream first, the piece after; off before the shower, the sea and the gym; a soft cloth and a dry drawer. Care & keeping has the whole of it, and it is shorter than you expect.