topic Re: Rhodium Plating in Jewelry

Rhodium Plating

Kachina624 — Thu, 30 Oct 2014 19:05:27 GMT

Samuel Benham is on ShopHQ this morning and just made an interesting statement. He said he doesn't use it because it's often used to hide inferior silver. Very thought provoking.

Re: Rhodium Plating

Clover29 — Thu, 30 Oct 2014 20:45:09 GMT

What is inferior silver? if it says 925, then it should be the same as any other regular silver.

Re: Rhodium Plating

chrystaltree — Thu, 30 Oct 2014 20:51:46 GMT

What does he mean by inferior silver? I always thought that rhodium is a pretty expensive metal. White gold is rhodium plated. So, why would a manufacturer apply it to an inferior grade of silver?

Re: Rhodium Plating

Kachina624 — Fri, 31 Oct 2014 00:29:03 GMT

He said it's recycled and has impurities in it.

Re: Rhodium Plating

HandJive — Fri, 31 Oct 2014 01:18:35 GMT

925 sterling silver has a melting point of 1639.4°F which is lower then silver and the various alloys used to produce it, so yes recycling silver technically could leave impurities in it, but they were there to begin with. This seems like a good place to post an article I ran across recently about jewelry companies that use recycled metals. I was surprised Carolyn Pollack wasn't on the list.