Stamp on jewelry: features and decoding

When buy­ing any piece of jew­el­ry, we always see small num­bers and var­i­ous let­ters and sym­bols on it. Not every­one knows what the brand on jew­el­ry means. This def­i­n­i­tion was intro­duced into the jew­el­ry busi­ness when it became nec­es­sary to track the con­sump­tion of pre­cious met­als, as well as their con­tent in alloys. From the sam­ple, you can deter­mine what pro­por­tion of the pre­cious met­al is in the alloy, and with the help of oth­er graph­ic sym­bols, you can find out the coun­try of ori­gin and oth­er infor­ma­tion. If you know what sam­ples of pre­cious alloys are, you can eas­i­ly deter­mine the qual­i­ty of any prod­uct from the jew­el­ry indus­try.

Brand­ing of jew­el­ry and every­thing you need to know about it

The stig­ma is cer­tain­ly put on all jew­el­ry and objects made of pre­cious met­als and their alloys. This includes mod­els with inserts of pre­cious and col­ored stones. The stig­ma is also nec­es­sar­i­ly placed on pre­mi­um prod­ucts. The sam­ple is not left on pre­cious met­al nuggets that are used as jew­el­ry (for exam­ple, pen­dants or inserts). There is also no need for hall­marks on gold/silver leaf, and also on pre­cious fram­ing used on dish­es, vas­es and cas­kets.

Absolute­ly all hall­marks of pre­cious met­al alloys are reg­u­lat­ed: they are con­trolled by spe­cial gov­ern­ment agen­cies. Each indi­vid­ual piece of jew­el­ry is sub­ject to con­trol. If the test is suc­cess­ful­ly passed and the mod­el ful­ly meets all inter­na­tion­al require­ments, it is stamped with num­bers, which indi­cates the sam­ple, as well as graph­ic signs. But if there is no such mark on the prod­uct, then its qual­i­ty is rather doubt­ful.

Accord­ing to inter­na­tion­al stan­dards, hall­mark­ing of jew­el­ry should in no way affect the design. Depend­ing on the type of dec­o­ra­tion, the stig­ma has a dif­fer­ent loca­tion. For exam­ple, on rings, the brand is locat­ed on the inside of the jew­el­ry. For pen­dants, a dif­fer­ent loca­tion of the hall­mark is char­ac­ter­is­tic: it is locat­ed near the ringlet — fas­ten­ers for sus­pen­sion. The sam­ple can also be found on the clasp of a chain, bracelet and ear­rings.

Stamp variations on different models

There are dif­fer­ent types of hall­marks on jew­el­ry. It all depends on the man­u­fac­tur­er of the jew­el­ry (includ­ing its geo­graph­i­cal loca­tion), as well as on the date of man­u­fac­ture. Until the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry, spool and carat assay sys­tems were pop­u­lar in the world. Now this sys­tem is facil­i­tat­ed and stan­dard­ized for almost all coun­tries of the world. The most pop­u­lar is the met­ric sys­tem (it uses 3‑digit num­bers).

Stamp on jew­el­ry — tran­script:

• geo­met­ric des­ig­na­tion — the type of met­al (for gold, a rec­tan­gu­lar mark is used, for sil­ver mod­els — a rec­tan­gu­lar mark with round­ed ends, and for plat­inum — an eight-point mark);
• dig­i­tal des­ig­na­tion is a decod­ing of the qual­i­ty lev­el of the met­al;
• the let­ters indi­cate the region in which the com­po­si­tion of the met­al was ver­i­fied, and the sam­ple was also tak­en;
• the graph­ic sym­bol in the hall­mark indi­cates the place of man­u­fac­ture of the jew­el­ry.

The most pop­u­lar met­als among jew­el­ry man­u­fac­tur­ers are gold and sil­ver. Sam­ples on them con­tain num­bers that indi­cate the pro­por­tion of pure met­al con­tent in them. For gold, 999 fine­ness is con­sid­ered to be the stan­dard — such jew­el­ry con­tains 99.9% of gold. Also, for gold jew­el­ry, 958, 750, 585, 500 and 375 sam­ples are used. Sil­ver mod­els can con­tain 999, 960, 925, 875, 830 and 800 fine­ness.

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