You are holding something heavy and shiny. Is it silver, or is it a lump of pot metal wearing a costume?
There are six ways to find out. The first is free and the last costs more than a car. Almost nobody needs the last one. Here is the whole progression, honestly, so you can stop at the level that suits you.
Level 0 — Look at the thing. Free.
Before you buy any gear, use your eyes.
Find the mark. Check the underside of the base, inside any hollow section, the flat of a tail or wing. You want 925, STERLING, 999, or Continental numbers like 800 and 835. Raking light — a lamp low and to the side — makes a worn stamp appear that looks like bare metal head-on.
Then look for the lie. EPNS, EPBM, A1, TRIPLE PLATE, GERMAN SILVER, NICKEL SILVER, ALPACCA — all plate or base metal. "German silver" contains exactly zero silver, which is magnificent branding by somebody in the 1800s.
Check the high points. Plating wears through where fingers go: ear tips, noses, wing edges. Yellow or grey peeking out of the raised bits is your answer, and it cost you nothing.
Level 1 — The magnet. About ten bucks.
Silver is not magnetic. But it is not nothing either, and that is the fun part.
Get a proper neodymium magnet, not the one holding your grocery list to the fridge. Bring it close. If the piece jumps and sticks, there is steel or iron in there and you are done in two seconds.
Now the trick worth knowing: tilt a silver surface and let the magnet slide down it. On real silver the magnet drags — it slides in slow motion, like it is moving through honey. That is eddy current braking. Silver is the best electrical conductor on the periodic table, so it does this better than almost any metal on earth. Pewter will not. Zinc will not.
It is not proof. It is a thirty-second gut check that eliminates the laziest fakes.
Level 2 — Acid. Fifteen bucks, and the honest workhorse.
This is what dealers actually use, every day, on most items.
Scratch the piece on a test stone, drop acid on the scratch, read the colour. Bright red means sterling territory. Darker red heading toward brown means lower purity. Green means you are holding something that is mostly not silver. Kits include a colour chart and a neutraliser.
The catch is real: you have to scratch the piece. On a plain bar, who cares. On a detailed figurine with a maker's mark, a scratch in a visible place costs more than the test is worth.
Test somewhere invisible — inside a hollow base, under a foot, the back of a plinth. And on anything that looks like designer work, do not test it at all until you know what it is. A Buccellati animal with a scratch across its flank is a cheaper Buccellati animal.
Worth noting: for telling plated from solid on small detailed items, touchstone and acid is often still the most suitable method there is. The expensive machines further down this list are not automatically better at this particular job.
Silver acid test kits on eBay · Silver testing solution
Level 3 — Electronic verifiers. A few hundred to a couple of thousand.
Now the toys. The name here is Sigma Metalytics and their Precious Metal Verifier line.
These ignore surface chemistry entirely. They push electromagnetic waves into the metal and measure its resistivity against stored profiles for fine silver, sterling, 90% silver and so on. Nothing gets scratched, results land in about a second, and it reads straight through plastic cases and graded slabs. Because the waves go into the body of the metal rather than skating across the top, thin plating gets caught immediately.
The part nobody selling one leads with: the PMV is built for coins and bars — regular shapes, flat, consistent thickness. Sigma's own guidance is that it generally is not the tool for jewellery and scrap. A hollow dragon with wings and a curled tail is exactly the geometry it likes least.
Stacking rounds? Superb, and probably the best few hundred dollars in this article. Collecting figurines? It will help on the chunky solid ones and shrug at the rest.
Level 4 — XRF. Purity, precisely. Five figures.
X-ray fluorescence excites the atoms in the metal and reads back actual elemental composition: 92.4% silver, 7.1% copper, traces of everything else. Non-destructive, seconds per test, and the closest thing to truth short of a fire assay.
Understand exactly what it is telling you, though. XRF does not see through metal the way a medical X-ray sees through you. It reads the elemental makeup of roughly the top 10 to 50 microns — surface and near-surface only. On dense metal like silver and gold, signals from deeper down are absorbed before they ever reach the detector.
Which means a core of copper or tungsten under a thick enough layer of fine silver can read as solid silver. That is not a flaw in the machine; it is physics. It is also why professional operators test multiple points, file a small notch to expose the core on scrap, and pair XRF with something that checks the inside.
Do not buy one. Local coin dealers, refiners and plenty of pawn shops have one on the counter, and many will test a piece free or nearly free — especially if you might sell to them.
Level 5 — Ultrasound. Structure, definitively.
This is the one that actually reads all the way through.
An ultrasonic thickness gauge sends a sound pulse into the object and times the echo off the far wall. Sound travels at a known, different speed through silver than through tungsten, copper or air. So the echo tells you whether the inside matches the outside — revealing cores, inserts and voids that XRF physically cannot reach.
It is very difficult, arguably impossible, to fake a bar convincingly enough to pass a proper ultrasonic test. Any suspicious ultrasound reading is a red flag worth chasing.
Its weakness is your collection. Ultrasound needs good acoustic contact with a smooth surface. Heavily embossed and textured surfaces make coupling inconsistent and results unreliable — and a figurine covered in scales, fur and feathers is about as embossed as an object gets. Brilliant on bars. Frustrating on dragons.
The professional move: nobody uses one test
Here is the thing that separates people who get fooled from people who do not.
XRF tells you what the surface is made of. Ultrasound tells you whether the inside agrees. Each one covers the other's blind spot, which is precisely why serious vaults and refiners run both rather than picking a favourite. Add conductivity and density and you have four independent physical properties that a counterfeit has to satisfy simultaneously. Matching one is easy. Matching all four is close to impossible.
What about the water and the density maths?
You will read about specific gravity everywhere: weigh it, dunk it, divide, compare to 10.3.
The arithmetic is sound and for a plain bar it is a genuinely useful cross-check. For figurines it is close to useless. It needs a solid object, and figurines are routinely hollow, weighted, filled, or mounted on stone and wood. Any of that wrecks the number and hands you a confident wrong answer, which is worse than no answer at all.
Great for a bar. Skip it for a fox.
So what should you actually do?
- Buying one nice piece? Level 0 and a magnet. Then buy from someone who states weight, purity and hallmark in writing.
- Hunting estate sales and flea markets regularly? Get the acid kit. Fifteen dollars, pays for itself the first weekend.
- Stacking bullion seriously? Sigma. Non-destructive, sees through slabs, one second per item.
- Holding something possibly worth thousands? Do not test it yourself. Find someone with an XRF, and if it is a bar, ask about ultrasound too.
Look up the mark before you test anything
Half the time the answer is already stamped on the piece and you just need to read it.
- Online Encyclopedia of Silver Marks — the best free mark database there is, sorted by country and by mark, with a whole section on silverplate marks designed to fool you.
- Silver Marks and Hallmarks Directory — strong on Italian and Continental marks, where a lot of figurine work originates.
- Silver hallmarks overview — why the British system looks the way it does.
Every piece we list states purity as marked or as tested, and says which one. If we could not determine it, the listing says unmarked and the price reflects that. You should not need an XRF to trust a description.