Everybody knows that gold is valuable because everybody keeps talking about it and there isn’t a shortage of willing buyers. Therefore, you should have no trouble selling your gold jewelry and make a lot of money, right? Well, selling gold jewelry is much more complicated than that.
Figuring out the worth of your gold involves making a series of intricate calculations and performing extensive tests. There’s no way around this because that’s what potential gold buyers look for when they assess the value of your gold. You need to learn these things if you want to sell your gold. So, what are these things anyway?
There’s More in Your Gold Jewelry than Just Gold
When you’re selling gold jewelry, don’t expect to get back what you paid for it. There are many factors that add to the price of gold jewelry.
Alloys
Gold is a soft metal and doesn’t make good building material. Jewelers counteract gold’s softness by combining it with another metal, like silver or copper, to make an alloy. Unfortunately for you, the presence of these other metals adds extra value to your jewelry. Although some of these metals are valuable as well, most gold buyers aren’t interested in them and won’t pay for them either.
Gemstones
Gemstones add value to any piece of gold jewelry. In fact, if they’re real, gemstones are very valuable themselves. However, gold buyers have little use for them. If you’re selling jewelry that contains gemstones, you should consider removing them and sell them separately.
Mark-ups
Jewelry prices also include mark-ups like labor costs and marketing, which make them a lot more expensive. Since you’re not the original creator or seller of your jewelry, the money you’ll receive will be much lower than its original price.
Aesthetics
Many people think that the aesthetics of a piece of jewelry will add extra value to it. However, unless it’s very rare, made by a popular designer, or was owned by somebody famous, the aesthetics play no part in determining the value of jewelry. Gold buyers don’t care about how your jewelry looks because they only want the gold.
What Factors Contribute to the Value of Gold Jewelry?
Actually, you only need to know the market price for gold as well as its weight and karat value.
Market Price
Gold prices act like stock prices: they go up or down depending on the supply of and the demand for gold. There’s no set price for gold and it can change throughout the day. You can find this with a simple Internet search. However, you must understand that the price is measured per troy ounce, which is different from a regular ounce.
What’s a troy ounce? You don’t need to know anything about troy ounces except that 1 troy ounce equals 31.1 grams.
Weight
This one’s easy. Put your gold jewelry on a scale and record the results, preferably in grams. If your scale only measures weight in ounces, just multiply the number of ounces by 28.3495231 to get grams.
Karat Value
There are three ways to figure out the karat value of your gold jewelry. The first way is to look for it on the gold itself. Most gold jewelry will have a marking that indicates its karat value. However, you need to be careful because many fakes will also have this marking.
The second and most used way is the acid test. This involves rubbing the gold on a stone and putting acid on the mark it leaves behind to see if it reacts to the gold. There are different acids for different karat values, so you may need to perform multiple tests to get the exact karat value.
If acid test makes you uncomfortable, the third way is to perform a Skey test. You will have to buy a special machine if you want to test your gold jewelry this way, but it doesn’t require rubbing your jewelry on a stone, which removes some gold from it every time you test it.
How to Determine Value Before Selling Gold Jewelry
Congratulations! You can finally calculate the worth of your gold. Here’s what you need to do:
- Divide the gold price by 31.1 to get the gold price in grams.
- Divide the karat value of your gold by 24.
- Multiply this number by the gold price in grams.
- Multiple that by the weight of your gold in grams.
This final number is how much your gold is worth to a potential buyer. If you don’t want to go through all those calculations, there are plenty of sites which will do them for you.
If you have any further questions about selling gold jewelry, please feel free to contact us contact us.
