To think gold plated means plated with gold?!

[Oscha]

I was in a piercing studio earlier that sells quite a lot of jewellery, and asked if they had any gold earrings. The man said, ‘well, only gold plated,’ which I said was fine. He then showed me a selection that were all under a fiver so I asked whether they were definitely plated with gold, and he replied ‘they’re steel, covered with gold.’ I commented that they were much cheaper than I’d expected, and he then said, ‘well gold plating isn’t real gold.’ I asked what he meant and he really couldn’t explain, but in the end seemed to say that they were just plated with a metal that was coloured gold.

Am I going mad? Gold plated means plated with gold, right?!

I didn’t buy them 😆

I think you both just had a different idea of what "Gold" is, either the actual metal, or the colour.

Your man doesn't know what he's selling...

Gold plated = other metal covered in actual gold.

Gold coloured = gold coloured any old metal

Gold plated means that there is actual gold on the earrings, but you never know what the base material is.
There are also different thicknesses of the gold layer used for jewellery and with earrings that cheap, my guess would be that the actual gold layer is somewhere between 0.1-0.2 µm thin.

You don't know what material the earrings are made of, nor whether they have another layer underneath, which could very well be nickel. So if you have allergies, you might want to not buy these.

I bought a few hypo-allergenic earrings online from somewhere like hypoallergeni earrings.co.uk (making that up!). Some were 24ct gold plated, others were gold coloured. They were all the sort designed for new piercings, with a secure back and very, very cheap. I want to say the Studex were gold plated but the others (C-something) were just gold coloured. Both work fine, don't seem to turn my skin black or green, and look a bit nicer than bare surgical steel.

As a piercer, the majority of body jewellery is titanium (can be rainbow, purple etc but also comes gold coloured), surgical steel (self explanitory) or surgical steel plated with real gold as a cheaper, autoclavable alternative to ie 9ct 24ct gold. These 3 metals are all i pierce with or sell, with the exception of bioplast (autoclavable plastic). Your man sounds rather gormless uninformed which is lame as people need to know what they are putting in their holes guffaw

Hi, I used to work in a plating shop.
When you electroplate something you don't use gold the metal you use cyanid which has gold salts in it.
The jewellery is put in a vat with a solution of cyanid then an electric current is run through the jewellery and the the partials of gold attach themselves to the jewellery.

Gold plated jewelery will quite often be silver plated with gold, hence the price. But it could be any metal.