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Understanding Gold Purity
Gold comes in many different karat weights, indicating it's purity. As you know the higher the purity, the more valuable the gold. Any item stamped either 24 kt , 990 or .9999 is considered to be pure. The karat system is increasingly being complemented or superseded by the millesimal fineness system, in which the purity of precious metals is denoted by parts per thousand of pure metal in the alloy instead of it's kt weight (ie .9999), Pure, or nearly pure gold usually comes in the form of gold bullion.
Unfortunately, pure gold is much too soft to make jewelry out of, and must be mixed with other metal alloys (often copper) to make it harder, and therefore more durable and useful. Jewelry and bullion are usually stamped, indicating the item's karat weight. Please see the table below for more information about this.
| Look for these markings | Other metals added (%) |
| 24kt , 990 or .9999 (pure) | 0 % |
| 22kt or 916 (91.6% pure) | .084 % |
| 21kt or 875 (87.5% pure) | .125 % |
| 18kt or 750 (75% pure) | 25 % |
| 16kt or dental gold (66% pure) | 34% |
| 15kt or 625 (62.5 % pure) | 37.5 % |
| 14kt or 585 (58.5 % pure) | 41.5 % |
| 12kt or 500 (50% pure) | 50 % |
| 10kt or 417 (41.7% pure) | 58.3 % |
| 9kt or 375 (37.5% pure) | 37.5 % |
| 8kt or 333 (33 % pure) | 66 % |
| No Stamping | Unknown |
Testing For Gold Purity:
There are 2 common ways to test gold purity. Unfortunately, neither method will be of much help to most people. The first method involves testing it with Nitric acid. However, we do not recommend using Nitric for fear of hurting yourself. A second method used a expensive electronic gold testing equipment to test for purity. In our experience, we have found these machines unreliable, therefore we do not use them.
Since you are probably not going to be able to test your own gold, you will have to go by the karat or millesimal fineness stamping on your gold, if there is one. If you are able to come into our store, we will test your gold right in front of you. Believe it or not, even items stamped as 14 kt (or other) gold are sometimes found to be fake or gold plated when we test them.