Precious Metals
Gold, Silver, Platinum, and Palladium are known as the Precious Metals in the jewelry industry. They are also called the Noble Metals.

Base Metals
Copper, Zinc, and Brass are known as base metals in the jewelry industry.

Karat
It is a unit to measure fineness-24 karat is fine gold. One Karat equals 1/24 (0.0417). Thus 14 Karat is 14/24 fine gold and the balance (10/24) alloy. If the gold content of an object is less than 10/24 the object cannot be represented as karat gold.

Colors of Gold
One can have yellow, green, red and white gold produced by variations in the alloy. Silver and zinc tend to give a green color, copper-red, and nickel-white.

Solid Gold
"Solid Gold" means fine gold or gold of 24 karat.

Gold Filled
Gold filled is made by electrolyticallly depositing fine gold on a base metal. The plate thickness must be at least 0.000007 can be labeled gold washed or colored.

Fine Silver
Fine silver means pure silver i.e. it contains no alloy material.

Sterling Silver
Sterling silver (92.5%) fine silver and rest copper. It is called coin silver because it was used for U.S. silver coins before 1966.

Commercial Silver
Commercial silver is a term applied to silver that is 99% (or more) fine silver.

Foreign Silverware
Foreign silverware contains varying percentages of silver. It may be as low as 10%.

Danish Silver
Silverware made in Denmark, which is 83% fine silver.

Silver Plated Ware
Silver plated ware is made by electroplating fine silver on a base metal alloy usually nickel silver, Britannia metal, brass or copper.

Nickel Silver
Nickel silver is a composition of nickel, copper and zinc. Surprisingly it contains no silver.

Britannia Metal
Britannia metal is a composition of tin, copper and antimony.

Pewter
Pewter was primarily a tin-lead alloy. It is now made in a tin, copper. Antimony composition similar to Britannia metal.

High Brasses
High brasses run from 55% copper in the extruded brass to 70% copper in the deep drawing brass, the balance being zinc.

Low Brasses
Low Brasses contain 80% or more copper, the rest is zinc.

Grain
It originally means weight of a grain of wheat of this unit is hardly in use now.

A Pennyweight
A pennyweight is the 1/20 of a troy ounce. The name originally applied to the weight of an Anglo-Norman pound.

An Ounce
An Ounce (troy) is about 10% heavier than the common avoirdupois ounce. There are 14.583 ounces troy in an avoirdupois pound.

Handmade
This term is applied to jewelry objects made entirely by hand without the use of machine tools.

Handwrought
Handwrought implies that the jewelry article was made partly by machine and partly by hand.

Carat
Carat is a unit of weight & equals to 3.086 grains or 1/5 of a gram.

"Perfect" Diamond
The word "perfect" describes any diamond without flaws, cracks, carbon spots, clouds or other blemishes or imperfections when examined under a 10-power magnifier.

Blue White
A diamond is called 'blue white' if it has traces of only blue colour & no other colour.