Featured Garnet & Opal Ring - Mark help

That’s disappointing to learn. I had no idea Chinese items came marked with European marks. My guess is whoever sold this didn’t know it either. Finding marks inside of it didn’t seem suspicious to me given where on the globe this ring was ordered and shipped from.

I’ll home test the metal in a bit and go get the stones looked at by a jeweler.

Pity.

 

They can be, I've seen some. But I logged off for the night too early. Aquitaine's super closeup reveals that time searching Birmingham marks was wasted!

 

Silversmith and jeweller's marks are often listed together.

 

Interesting results on the acid tests. The gold wash came up between 18k-22k. The bits showing no gold wash gave me a reading of 800 silver.

I gave it a gentle wash with soap and water because the back of the stones looked nasty from hand grime.

My children had a playdate prearranged with cousins, when we get back home I’m still going to polish and look again.

Fake marks or not it seems fairly well made. I’m emotionally prepared now if this is a fake but curious and determined to learn.

 

I wonder if it's a pseudo mark rather than a fake. A true British vermeil hallmarked ring ought to be 925 silver.

 

Next acid test I take I’ll post pics. It looked dark brown/red as opposed to just red to me. I’m using a scratch stone. I don’t want to drop acid directly on it.

 

.

 

That's the best way.

 

So here we are again: My little tester said (what I remember, I lost the instructions ages ago) the bright red would be .999, dull red is .925, brown-red is 800 and less comes up green. I thought this was a brown red. Thoughts?

Here is the sizes of the ring. I don’t know if that would make much of a difference on why the marks (if real) could be smooshed but perhaps it could. I’m waiting for my Nikon to charge up and I’m going to try photographing it again with a non-iPhone lens.

 

The hallmarks on your ring were not stamped by an assay office.

 

No, it couldn't. When a piece is ready, it is sent off to an assay office where the metal fineness is tested and the piece is stamped accordingly. No smooshing possible. As Holly said, these marks are not stamped at an assay office.
I have smaller rings with perfect hallmarks. Hallmarks can even be punched on earrings.

 

I'm pretty sure that if I'd had this ring I would have made the erroneous assumption that those were simply poorly struck English hallmarks, and not thought twice about it, so reading this thread has been quite a wake up for me.

Learning that spurious marks are out there now in quantity is eye opening. I'm going to be much more vigilant in future thanks to this thread and those eagle eyes who pointed this out.

BMRT, sorry it isn't what you'd hoped.

 

It's not just spurious ones, it's lookalikes: some American silver marks and many plate marks were done to look like British silver hallmarks.

 

Maybe no one understood what is in the photo in post #11.The OP's ring was never stamped with hallmarks,it was cast from a wax model with the fake marks in the wax.

 

The photo in post 11 is Aquitaine's enhanced version of photo #1, using a AI Gigapixel program in an attempt to sharpen it. It may have altered the original image slightly.

Perhaps photo #1 shows the same result.

 

The first photos were out of focus and too small,the items telling me are in the first photo and the photo in post #11 confirmed it.

 

Thank you for explaining it to me. While these things may seem as common sense to some with years of experience for a newbie like me...it isn’t. Now it’s something I know and understand and I’ll be better armed in the future.

I’m still going to ask my jeweler to assess everything else. I’m used to fakes being outright fake on everything so I was expecting the metal to not even come up as silver or gold plate at all. I wonder if the stones are glass or they are what they had been sold as.

 

Truly. The only thing that makes me feel better is I would have made this mistake even if I was able to physically looking at it before I bought it. I was surprised that a seller concentrated in antiques/vintage items fell for it too but perhaps I shouldn’t be. Suspicion can be a healthy thing.

At this point I’ll be satisfied to get a true confirmation on metal content and stone classification. Fake marks? Got it. Fake composition? To be continued...

 

I am in Western Europe, so I have been exposed to the concept of official hallmarking all my life. That helps to understand hallmarks in general.... if only a bit.

I'd love to hear the test results when you've been to a jeweller.