In this guide
The five checks below are real physics, not folklore — every one works on a principle you can name. Every one also falls well short of proving purity, and the useful half of this guide is knowing exactly where each line falls.
Decide what you are testing for
A silver article can disappoint you in three quite different ways, and the home checks are only good against one of them.
- It is not silver at all. Brass, nickel silver, pewter or a bright-plated steel. Home checks are genuinely good at catching this.
- It is silver-plated base metal. A real, very thin layer of silver bonded over brass or copper. Home checks are poor at catching this, because the surface you are testing is silver.
- It is silver, but of a lower fineness than claimed. An 800 alloy sold as 925. Home checks are useless against this. Not weak — useless.
We are not going to tell you which of the three is most common, because we do not know and neither does anyone quoting you a percentage. What we can tell you is the direction: as you go down that list, everything on this page gets less able to help.
If the numbers themselves are what you are unsure about, start with what silver purity means and where 925 comes from — then come back and test.
The magnet test — what sticks, and what slides
Silver is diamagnetic: a magnetic field repels it very weakly instead of attracting it. Nothing made of silver will ever cling to a magnet. If a piece jumps to one, there is iron or steel in it and you can stop there.
That is the crude version, and on its own it proves almost nothing, because brass, copper, aluminium, lead and pewter are not attracted either. The version worth doing is the slide.
Tilt the piece to about forty-five degrees and let a strong neodymium magnet slide down a flat face. On silver the magnet does not drop — it creeps, as though the surface were slightly sticky. On brass or a plated steel it simply falls.
The mechanism is not diamagnetism, whatever the internet says. It is induction. A moving magnet drives circulating currents in a conductor beneath it, those currents generate their own opposing magnetic field, and the magnet is braked by its own wake. The braking scales with electrical conductivity, and silver has the highest electrical conductivity of any metal — which is why the effect is so pronounced on a good silver bar.
What it does not prove. Copper brakes a magnet nearly as well, and aluminium does it visibly too. A silver-plated copper article passes this test perfectly. It also needs a flat face with some mass behind it: a kolusu (anklet), a fine chain or a filigree jhumka earring gives the magnet nothing to work against, so the test is simply unavailable on most of what people own.
And clasps and springs on genuine silver jewellery are often steel, quite legitimately. A tug at the clasp is normal, not a finding.
The ice test — silver's one hard-to-fake property
Silver conducts heat better than any other metal, and that is the physical property a fake finds hardest to imitate. Copper is second, gold is well behind, and everything used to make cheap silver-coloured goods is far behind that.
The method is embarrassingly simple. Bring the article to room temperature, rest it on a flat surface, and put an ice cube on it — with a second cube on a ceramic tile or a steel plate alongside for comparison. On solid silver the cube starts running within seconds, noticeably ahead of the control.
What you are watching is heat being pulled out of the whole body of the metal and delivered to the contact face — which is why this check reads the bulk, not the surface, and is the one test on this page that plating does not comfortably defeat. A silver-plated brass tray melts ice like brass, because underneath the flash of silver it is brass.
What it does not prove. Published figures put silver's lead over copper at under ten per cent, which is nothing you can see with an ice cube — so silver-plated copper sails through. It needs mass and a flat face, so chains and hollow work are out. And it cannot grade fineness: an 800 alloy and a 925 alloy melt ice at practically the same rate.
The practical rule
Run the magnet slide and the ice test on the same flat face. Taken together they tell you this is a highly conductive, non-ferrous metal all the way through. They still do not tell you it is silver.
The ring test — useful on coins, useless on jewellery
Struck cleanly, silver rings: a high, clear note that hangs in the air for a second or two. Lead, tin and pewter give a dead thud instead.
Balance a coin or a small solid article on a fingertip so it is barely supported, and tap the edge once with another coin or a fingernail. Holding it in your fist damps the vibration and kills the test.
What you are hearing is internal damping. Soft, lossy metals swallow the vibration almost immediately; a hard, elastic alloy lets it run. It is an old assayer's habit, and it is genuinely informative about a very short list of metals.
What it does not prove. Bronze and brass ring superbly — temple bells and cymbals are made of bronze, not silver, for exactly this reason. So the ring test excludes lead, tin and pewter, and excludes essentially nothing else.
It also needs a solid, freely supported article — a coin, a bar, the body of a kuthuvilakku (oil lamp). Solder joints, set stones, chain links and hollow sections all mute the note, which rules out most jewellery, and we would not tap anything we cared about with a hard object in the first place.
The smell and tarnish test — one weak half, one useful half
These two are usually bundled as one test. They should be separated: one is close to worthless, the other is quietly among the better signals on this page.
The smell half
The metallic smell you are testing for is not coming from the metal. Chemists established two decades ago that the odour left on your hand after handling iron or copper is your own skin oils being decomposed by metal ions on contact. The nose reports "metal"; what it has detected is body odour. Copper does it too, which is why loose change smells the way it does.
So a strong metallic smell after rubbing tells you there is reactive base metal at the surface. Which would be a fine finding, except that sterling silver is 92.5% silver and about 7.5% copper by design. Genuine 925 can smell faintly metallic when it is warmed and rubbed. It is the least informative thing on this page and we would never act on it alone.
The tarnish half
Silver tarnishes, and tarnish is a good sign rather than a bad one. Silver reacts slowly with sulphur compounds in the air to form silver sulphide, which is black. A tray that has gone grey-black at the back of a cupboard has behaved exactly as silver is supposed to behave.
In a Tamil household the pooja-room silver darkens fastest of all — lamps and vessels in daily use sit in warm, humid, smoke-laden air, and turmeric does the rest. That is the ordinary life of silver pooja articles and lamps, not a defect in them.
The suspicious case is the reverse: a piece that has been handled for years, kept in ordinary household air, and has never darkened anywhere — not in a crevice, not behind a clasp, not under a chain link.
What it does not prove. Silver-plated brass tarnishes just as convincingly, because the plating is real silver. Rhodium-plated sterling and lacquered silverware do not tarnish at all, and both are perfectly legitimate. And tarnish says nothing whatever about fineness — if anything a lower-fineness alloy, carrying more copper, discolours faster.
Reading the stamp — and why it means less on silver than on gold
This is the check almost everyone does first, and on silver in India it carries far less weight than people assume. The reason is regulatory rather than metallurgical.
Hallmarking of gold jewellery is mandatory across India's notified districts. Hallmarking of silver is not — it remains voluntary. A very large amount of entirely genuine silver therefore carries no BIS mark at all, so the absence of one tells you far less than it would on a gold chain. And a bare number punched into the metal is not a hallmark; it is a claim by whoever owned the punch.
The numbers are the easy half. A fineness mark is parts of silver per thousand, so 925 means 92.5% silver with the balance almost always copper. BIS hallmarks silver against IS 2112:2014, which permits six grades — 800, 835, 900, 925, 970 and 990. Worth noticing what is not on that list: 999. Fine silver is entirely real and it is what bullion is made of, but it is not a grade a BIS centre marks on jewellery or artefacts. For the continental and antique numbers, see our chart of every silver fineness mark.
The words are the harder half, because three of them are built to be read quickly and misread.
| Mark | What it actually means |
|---|---|
| EPNS | Electroplated nickel silver — a base-metal article with a thin silver layer on top. |
| Nickel silver / German silver / Alpacca | No silver in it at all. Copper, nickel and zinc, named for the colour. |
| A1 / silver plate / plated | Plating marks, not fineness marks. They describe a coating, not a content. |
A genuine BIS hallmark on silver is a different order of evidence. It carries the BIS standard mark, the purity grade, and a HUID — the unique code that also appears on hallmarked gold. Silver hallmarking was put on that HUID footing in September 2025, which means a hallmarked silver piece can now be checked in the free BIS Care app in the same way as a gold one, returning the registered purity and the centre that tested it.
Our guide to reading a BIS hallmark and verifying a HUID walks through the app step by step. The procedure is identical; only the mandate differs.
The one line to remember about stamps
A number punched into silver is an assertion. A BIS mark with a HUID that resolves in the app is evidence. They are not the same thing and they are not close.
What none of these can tell you
Set the five side by side: each closes off one class of fake, and each has a specific material that walks straight through it.
| Check | What it catches | What defeats it |
|---|---|---|
| Magnet slide | Iron and steel; poorly conducting alloys | Copper and aluminium; needs a flat face with mass |
| Ice | Brass, nickel silver and pewter bodies, including under plating | Copper cores; anything thin, hollow or chain-like |
| Ring | Lead, tin and pewter | Brass and bronze, which ring beautifully; any soldered or stone-set piece |
| Smell | Reactive base metal at the surface | Sterling's own copper content |
| Stamp | Nothing, unless it is a BIS hallmark with a HUID | A steel punch |
And not one of the five can grade fineness. If the question you actually need answered is how pure is this, no arrangement of magnets and ice cubes will get you there.
The answer that does settle it is an assay at a recognised assaying and hallmarking centre. It is worth knowing how that differs from the gold procedure, because the two are routinely confused. Gold is assayed by cupellation — the classic fire assay. Silver is not: silver is determined by a wet chemical method, in which a sample is dissolved and then measured, most often by titration. An XRF machine is used first as a rapid screen, and it is genuinely useful, but XRF reads only the outermost layer of the metal — which is precisely why the wet method, working on a dissolved sample taken from the body of the article, is the one that settles a dispute over thick plating.
If you want the number, the piece has to go on a machine or into a solution — our guide on how a jeweller checks silver purity, and what to ask for sets out what happens at the counter and what should end up written on your bill.
The one-sentence version
Home checks are for ruling things out. Only an assay rules something in.
None of which is academic. Silver is sold on weight at the day's rate — per gram in Vellore as we publish this () — with making charges and GST on top, and the current figure is on today's silver rate page. Rates are indicative and confirmed at the time of billing at the showroom. Fineness is what that weight is being paid for.
The equivalent guide for gold — what home tests can honestly tell you about gold — reaches the same conclusion by a completely different route, which is usually a sign the conclusion is right.
Questions we are asked
Does real silver stick to a magnet?
No. Silver is diamagnetic, meaning it is very weakly repelled by a magnetic field rather than attracted to it, so nothing made of silver will cling to a magnet. But brass, copper, aluminium, lead and pewter are not attracted either. Passing the magnet test proves only that there is no steel or iron in the piece.
Can I tell 925 silver from 800 silver at home?
No. Nothing you can do at a kitchen table separates 92.5% silver from 80% silver. The alloying metal in both is usually copper, the weight difference is small, and every home check behaves almost identically on the two. That gap is precisely why hallmarking and laboratory assay exist.
My silver has turned black. Does that mean it is fake?
Usually the opposite. Silver reacts with sulphur compounds in the air to form black silver sulphide, so tarnish is evidence that the surface really is silver. A gentle polish brings it back. The more suspicious case is a piece that has been handled for years and has never darkened anywhere at all.
Is silver jewellery hallmarked in India the way gold is?
Not in the same way. Hallmarking is mandatory for gold jewellery but remains voluntary for silver, so a great deal of perfectly genuine silver carries no BIS mark. Silver that is hallmarked now carries a HUID, which you can check in the BIS Care app exactly as you would for gold.
What does EPNS mean on a silver-looking article?
Electroplated nickel silver. It is a base-metal article carrying a thin layer of genuine silver on the outside. Nickel silver and German silver, despite the names, contain no silver at all — they are copper, nickel and zinc alloys named for their colour.
Bring the piece in and we will check it properly
We assess purity and weight in front of you before any exchange or valuation, and we state the purity of the article on the bill. There is no charge for finding out what you own.