The purity of your gold jewellery is often something that you're informed about, rather than something that you know for yourself. With malpractices rampant in the nation, perhaps it might be easier to know how you can find out the purity level for yourself.
Firstly, this has been made easier by the fact that the hallmarking of gold will soon be mandatory. From January 15, Union Consumer Affairs Minister, Ram Vilas Paswan had announced, it will be mandatory to hallmark gold jewellery and artifacts.
Hallmarking is practiced in a mandatory manner in many countries across the world.
The process of hallmarking makes it necessary for jewellers to get a licence from the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) before they can get their gold marked at a BIS-recognized centres. Reportedly there are 877 such centres as of October 2019.
Hallmarking is done by a random sampling method, with a few pieces in the batch being tested for purity.
So what are the categories that gold purity can be marked into?
Purity is measured in carats, whith 24 carats (K) of gold being the purest form. This however cannot be used to make jewellery as it is far too malleable.
For the purposes of hallmarking, there are three categories:
14K - 58.5% purity (hallmarked as 14K585)
18K - 75% purity (hallmarked as 18K750)
22K - 91.6% purity (hallmarked as 22K916)
The hallmark, when combined with the price of gold for the day, can give you an idea of how much buying gold would cost you at the time.
To this price, you have to add making charges and taxes as applicable.
