TIP: Not all that glitters is gold...

Etsymetal member Chris Parry shared this story with his fellow team mates in our private forums. I felt it was a lesson that needed to be shared with our blog readers as well....

fake-ring-2, originally uploaded by Chris Parry.

A little story goes with this ring.

A customer brought this into me and asked me if it was real. At the time it was a very shiny gold colour. (It had been gold plated.)

Inside the ring, you can just make out two marks a 750 and a 18k. Both presuming to mean that it is 18k gold.

However, when he gave it to me, the colour of the gold was wrong and the weight as well. The spurious marks also made me feel this ring was a fake.

So I put it under my torch and as you can see the resulting black mess proves that it is just a brass/copper metal underneath.

It does infact look like a plumbers olive. Something used by plumber in the UK when installing water pipes in houses.

The client had bought this ring from a beggar in Lonodon for £5 and his own words, "it was worth a gamble".

You could probably buy a 100 of these olives for a £5.

So the beggar was no ordinary beggar, as he clearly had access to a gold plating unit, so he was in fact probably a scam artist.

Then about six months later, a lady bought an identical ring in to me and I gave her the same bad news, but she insisted it had been in her family for years (Probably just embarrassed that she had parted with good money for a fake)

Be warned you all, not all that glitters is gold
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On a similar note, Etstmetal members, Danielle Miller and Victoria Takahashi are working on a jewelry buying guide of sorts...definitions of materials, terms, etc. to help the buying public understand what they are looking at. For example: 18k gold vs. gold filled. Keep posted for that info in the near future...