Gold Plated vs Solid Gold: Here's the Difference

Feb 05, 2025
Gold Plated vs Solid Gold: Here's the Difference

Gold Plated vs Solid Gold: Here's the Difference

When getting new gold pieces to your jewelry collection, it’s more important that you get the best quality. When you begin looking for the one you like you will probably find both gold plated and solid gold jewelry, and not knowing the difference is unlikely unless you are in the know.


Metal in the gold can alloy to other metals so that strengths and hues can be easier. Other metals tarnish because some react to their chemicals, but pure gold does not. It isn’t tarnished by other chemicals, mostly oxygen and reacts well with pure gold. In electronic devices, gold can be highly conductive.

What does ‘gold plated’ mean then?

Jewelry like this is called gold plated, where the core metal (copper, nickel, brass or zinc) is dipped and plated exclusively with pure gold. There is possibly as little as .05 amount of gold in the piece if the majority of gold plated jewelry.


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Manufacturers electroplate the base metal to bond to a gold layer. In electroplating, a negative electrical current delivers water and metal salt to the base metal which attracts negative charged gold atoms and bonds with them. The layer of metal plating over the base metal also wears itself, so will wear until the base metal is seen.

Solid Gold vs. Gold Plated: What’s the Difference?

Solid gold jewelry is solid gold jewelry from other means of production. Another solid gold type of jewelry merchandise are a number of solid gold jewelry merchandise inclusive of jewelry, rings, pendants as well as earrings which can be made from a very high percentage weight of 100% unadulterated gold dissolved with determined or selected metals and shaped into robust, high high priced solid gold jewelry.

Gold Karat

Solid gold numbers is what karats is used to measure and 24K gold, the purest and raw precious metal that is used by miners when extracting it. Our 24k gold is malleable and not tarnishing; 100% raw 24k gold. It is so good because of its value, it's excellent working into intricate jewelry designs. Because 24K is so malleable, it’s never used in jewelry because it’s a very easy material to dent or scratch. Solid gold gold is generally sold at most jewelers 18K, 14K and 10K.


So the 24 karats in our gold isn’t all 24 karats: some of it is other metals like copper.


If they can’t make that shiny piece, but were able to shape the more durable, scratch and dent resistant piece. Other metals: white gold, rose gold — but they’ve got their own hues, too.

Solid Gold Alloys

Also used for metal alloying, for example different coloured pieces of different proportions of assorted metals. 


for example an 18k yellow gold necklace that very likely is 75% gold, 15% silver, and 10% copper. 


If you got it pinkish actually because it contains copper, so when it's copper in our rose gold piece it gives it a rose gold piece might have little more than 75% of the gold being pure gold and the rest of it's a mix of copper and another alloy. The metal in white gold is one part pure gold, the rest being nickel, zinc, and iron (making the approximate 75% gold total and ~ 25% for the metal).


In the case of the Karat line of the gold piece percentages change that means that 10K yellow gold pieces have about 41% of pure gold and 10K pieces about 58% pure gold; you can only sell gold piece less than 10K of pure gold if there is no purity clearly marked on the gold piece.

Gold Plated vs Solid Gold : What’s the difference?

Gold plated jewelry is cheaper than gold jewelry, but it’s not really gold and it doesn’t really keep its color and shine. The only valuable asset here is gold plated jewelry that’s not really gold, so that’s nothing, but when they rust they rust fast, …prone to oxidation, and brass and copper are also… prone to oxidation, will eventually turn greenish. Normal, gold plated pieces will probably not conduct with day to day stuff like shampoo, sweat, perfume or chlorine unless you wear them a lot.


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The majority of gold plated jewelry will go bad in one or two years time and become tarnished. It doesn’t make it a bad choice for the budget, or if you only plan to use jewelry in a fashion sense, but if you’re buying for yourself or as the end to an arm party, solid gold is the best.


Solid gold pieces, like elegantly designed solid gold earrings, are preferable because they:

  • Do not tarnish

  • Dolphins are not affected by chemicals such as chlorine or soap.

  • And they are durable and can be scratch resistant.

  • Last for decades or longer

  • Hold high monetary value

  • This will give you the classic and timeless style.

Tell Solid Gold or Gold Plated items.

This is a great, and very dependable, way to tell if it is platinum or solid gold for gold plated pieces and other solid gold pieces. The National Gold and Silver Stamping Act of 1905 set standards for gold piece marking.

Gold Plated Markings

If the piece is a gold plated piece the legal mark around it is usually GP or GEP (or gold plated, gold electroplated). The pieces themselves will have 'HGE' or 'HGP', which means heavy gold electroplating or heavy gold plating. It’s called rolled gold plates, or RGP.


The superficial markings of gold filled pieces could also serve as the marks used on plated gold pieces. Again, if we consider a gold plated piece, one dipped in 18K gold that contains .025% gold content, the piece would have the label: “1/40 18K gold plated.”

Solid Gold Markings

So whenever you hear “14K gold” it means that 14 out of 24 parts of the solid piece is pure gold or 14 out of the 24 parts. On rare occasions solid gold is called 'plumb gold.' The amount of gold of the item is jeweler’s term for Solid Plumb gold. The first definition of it is that of the correct, the materials or those materials related to the pure gold component of that piece.


Plumb, or 'P' as on the piece, is not plated. If you find 18KP, 18 karat plumb. 


When the National Gold and Silver Marking Act was passed in 1981, it became necessary to mark plumb gold jewelry. There should never have been more than that to be able to be led astray by, this should have been strict jeweler and retailer law. Plumb gold is a piece as against a number, a certain amount of gold.


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