Our standard
What the market sells. What we sell.
Almost every listing in this category says the same three words: gold plated jewellery. It does not tell you the metal underneath, the grade of that metal, how the colour was applied, or how thick it is. Those four things decide whether a piece still looks like this in a year. Here is what is usually behind that phrase, and what is behind ours.
Zinc or mixed alloy, usually described only as ‘alloy’. Where steel is claimed, it is commonly 304 — the cheaper grade, with no molybdenum, so it pits where sweat sits.
316L stainless steel, and nothing else. 316L carries 2–3% molybdenum, which is what stops chloride pitting — the reason 304 discolours at the contact points and 316L does not.
One or two quick baths: a copper strike and a gold flash. It is dipped, and it wears through at the edges first.
PVD — the gold is ion-bonded onto the steel under vacuum, not dipped. We sell it in 14K and 18K tones, and the tone is stated on every product page.
Zinc alloy castings. Light in the hand, brittle, and prone to snapping at the prongs and joins.
Cast copper alloy — brass — from one of the world’s largest fashion-jewellery manufacturers. Their whole range is copper alloy and stainless steel. They do not cast in zinc, and that is most of why an occasion piece from us has weight in the hand that a market piece does not. Brass is also the only one of the three that lets a prong be pushed over a stone without cracking, which is why ornate jewellery is brass everywhere — ours included.
One or two baths straight onto the casting, with no barrier layer. The copper migrates up through the gold and the piece goes dull, often within weeks.
Multi-layer electroplating with a barrier layer between the copper and the gold. The barrier is the part that matters: it is what the copper cannot travel through. Our supplier builds this stack to order rather than publishing one fixed recipe, so we state the stack we have actually confirmed for a design on that design’s product page — and where we have not confirmed it yet, we leave the field empty instead of filling it in. We also ask for nickel-release and lead-content test results, to EN 1811 and ASTM F2999, before we place an order.
0.05 to 0.2 micron is normal at the cheap end. That is a flash of colour with almost no wear reserve, and it is where most unlabelled ‘gold plated’ jewellery sits. The figure is almost never printed, because printing it would end the sale.
0.5 micron is our floor, and more than that on rings and bangles, where the friction is. The actual figure for the piece you are looking at is printed in its Specification tab — not a range, not a category average, that piece.
Glued in. Glue lets go, and the stone is gone.
Hand-set with prongs on every piece built to take them. Slower, dearer, and it holds.
‘18K gold plated.’ No metal named, no grade, no process, no thickness.
Base metal, plating, process and thickness, printed on the specification table of every single product page — including where the answer is brass, and including where the honest answer is that we have not confirmed a figure yet.
A barrier layer matters more than gold thickness.
On brass, copper migrates up through the gold and dulls a piece from underneath. Two and a half microns of gold laid straight onto bare brass will go dull faster than one micron laid over a proper barrier. That is what a multi-layer stack buys you: not more gold, but a layer the copper cannot cross. It is why we ask a supplier about the barrier before we ask about the microns, and why a thickness figure quoted on its own tells you less than it looks like it does.
Where we will not guess.
Fashion-jewellery factories publish colours and standards, not plating recipes. Ours publishes its materials, its REACH and RoHS compliance and its inspection process, and it specifies the plating stack per order. So the figures on our product pages are the ones we have confirmed for that design, and a blank field means we have not confirmed it yet. We would rather show you a gap than a number we invented.
Two tiers, and we tell you which one you are buying.
316L steel with PVD is built for daily wear: through a Delhi summer, to the gym, in the shower. Brass with multi-layer plating is built for occasions. It is the only way to get hand-set stones and deep casting detail, and it wants to be kept dry and taken off before water. Both are on this site. Neither is dressed up as the other. The specification table on every product page tells you which one you are looking at, before you buy.