Fine Jewelry · Metals Guide

How to Tell if Gold Is Real: Stamps, Tests and What Actually Works

By Tushar Leclerc · 9 min read

Last Updated: September 3, 2026

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Most articles on this answer the question with a list of kitchen experiments: hold a magnet to it, drop it in water, rub it on a plate. Those tests exist, and we will go through them, but leading with them gets the priority backwards.

The stamp tells you the answer in almost every case. The tests are for the small minority of pieces that carry no stamp at all, or where you have reason to doubt the one that is there.

How to tell if gold is real: start with the stamp

Nearly all gold jewellery carries a tiny purity mark, usually inside a ring's band, on a necklace clasp, or on the tag near a bracelet's closure. You will often need a magnifying glass or a phone camera zoomed all the way in.

Two systems are in use, and they mean the same thing. American pieces usually carry a karat number. European and imported pieces usually carry a three-digit millesimal number, which is simply the parts of pure gold per thousand.

Any of those, on its own, means the piece is solid gold throughout. Under US rules, something sold plainly as "gold" is expected to be at least 10K unless it is clearly labelled as plated or filled.

Alongside the purity mark you may find a maker's mark, which identifies the manufacturer. On older British and European pieces there may also be an assay office symbol and a date letter, which is a separate system requiring specialist knowledge to read.

GP, GF, HGE: what the letters mean

These are the stamps that tell you a piece is not solid gold. If you see letters rather than a bare karat number, the gold is a coating over something else.

• GP — gold plated. A thin layer of gold over a base metal.
• GEP. Gold electroplated: the same, applied with an electric current.
• HGE or HGP — heavy gold electroplate. Thicker than standard plating, still plating.
• RGP. Rolled gold plate: an older method bonding a thin gold sheet to base metal.
• GF. Gold filled: a substantially thicker bonded layer, where the gold must be at least 5% of the item's total weight. Often written as a fraction, such as 1/20 14K GF.

A karat number appearing next to these letters describes the coating, not the piece. "18K GP" means the plating is 18 karat gold; the item underneath is not.

Worth saying plainly, because plenty of jewellers are cagey about it: plated and gold-filled jewellery are legitimate products, not frauds. Respected brands sell them. Gold-filled in particular wears well for years. The only problem is when a piece is sold as solid gold and isn't.

Why gold jewellery is stamped 925

This one confuses more people than anything else on the list. You find a gold-coloured necklace, look at the clasp, and it says 925.

925 is the mark for sterling silver: 92.5% silver. On a gold-coloured piece it means the base is sterling silver with gold plated over it, which is normally called gold vermeil. The stamp is not a mistake or a forgery. It is accurately describing the metal underneath.

Vermeil is the better end of plated jewellery, since sterling silver is a far kinder base than brass and the piece stays wearable once the plating thins. It is still not solid gold, and it should not be priced as though it were.

At-home tests, and what each one actually proves

If a piece has no stamp, or you doubt the stamp, these are the tests worth doing. Read the third column before you trust any of them.

Notice what none of these do: prove the karat. A piece can pass every test above and still be 10K sold to you as 18K. Only laboratory testing settles that.

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The tests we would tell you to skip

Three appear in almost every guide on this subject, and we would not do any of them to our own jewellery.

The acid test. It works, and it is what jewellers used for a century, but it involves nitric acid, it requires you to file a notch into the piece first, and the acid is genuinely hazardous to handle. Testing kits are sold for home use. We would still send the piece to a jeweller rather than keep acid in a kitchen drawer.

The bite test. Biting gold to look for tooth marks is a cartoon, not a method. Pure 24K is soft enough to mark, but almost no jewellery is 24K, and lead is softer than gold anyway. You are risking a tooth to learn nothing.

The float test. Dropping a piece in water to see whether it sinks tells you it is denser than water. So is almost every metal. It cannot distinguish gold from brass.

How to tell if a gold chain or necklace is real

Chains are where most of this question gets asked, and they are also the hardest case, because a chain has more surface and less mass than a ring, which makes plating easier to hide.

Start with the clasp. On a chain the stamp is almost always on the clasp itself or on a small flat tag beside it, not on the links.

Then check the links at the back of the neck. That is where a chain rubs most, so plating fails there first, and a gold chain worn for a year or two will show a duller, greyer or pinker metal underneath if it is plated.

Finally, weigh it in your hand. A solid gold chain of any real length has a density people find surprising the first time. A plated chain of the same dimensions feels hollow by comparison, because it usually is.

One thing that catches people out: a hollow gold chain can be entirely solid gold and still feel light, because the links are tubes rather than solid wire. Hollow construction is legitimate and common for larger designs, and it is not the same as plating.

When to have it tested properly

If the answer matters, get it tested rather than guessed. That means anything you are insuring, selling, buying secondhand, or that has sentimental weight.

Most jewellers will test a piece while you wait, often free. The modern method is an XRF analyser, which reads the metal composition without touching or damaging the item, and gives you the actual karat rather than an educated guess. It is the only way to confirm purity rather than merely confirm "some gold is present".

The one caution: XRF reads the surface. A thickly plated piece can briefly read high, which is why a jeweller will also check the piece's weight and look at wear points.

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What "solid gold" means, and why we only sell it

Solid gold means the alloy runs all the way through: there is no core of a different metal and no coating. It does not mean pure gold. A 14K piece is solid gold and 58.3% gold, the rest being alloy metals that give it hardness and colour.

Everything we make is solid 10K, 14K or 18K gold. No plating, no vermeil, no gold-filled. That is a deliberate choice rather than a boast: a plated piece looks identical on day one and different in year two, and we would rather not sell a difference you only discover later.

You can check it the same way you would check anyone's. Every Riona piece carries its karat stamp, and the wear points will still be gold in a decade because there is nothing to wear through. If you want to understand which karat suits how you live, our guide to 10K vs 14K vs 18K gold covers the trade-offs, including the one most guides get backwards.

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