If you are buying silver in India, here is the uncomfortable fact: hallmarking silver is still voluntary. Gold jewellery has been under mandatory BIS hallmarking for years. Silver has not. The Bureau of Indian Standards is actively studying what it would take to make silver hallmarking mandatory, and adoption is climbing fast — over 59 lakh silver articles were hallmarked in FY 2025-26, up from roughly 32 lakh the year before — but until the rule changes, a seller is under no legal obligation to prove purity to you.
That means the burden of proof sits with the buyer. Below are five checks you can run yourself, in order of how much they actually tell you.
1. Look for the hallmark and the HUID
Since September 2025, any silver article that carries a BIS hallmark must also carry a Hallmark Unique Identification number under the revised IS 2112:2025 standard. That HUID is a six-character alphanumeric code you can look up in the BIS Care app to see what was tested and by whom. A hallmark without a HUID on a piece made after that date is worth a question.
Absence of a hallmark does not mean the silver is fake — most Indian silver, including a great deal of genuine handmade work, is unhallmarked because the process is voluntary and adds cost to small-batch pieces. But its presence is the single strongest signal available.
2. The ice test
Silver has the highest thermal conductivity of any metal. Put an ice cube directly on the piece and it should start melting noticeably faster than it would on any other metal of similar size. This is a genuinely good test because it is a property of the metal itself and very difficult to fake in a plated item, where the plating is only microns thick.
3. The magnet test
Sterling silver is not magnetic. Take a strong magnet and hold it against the piece. If it grabs, there is ferrous metal inside, which means it is either plated over steel or heavily adulterated. A useful variation: tilt the piece and slide the magnet down its surface. On real silver the magnet slides slowly rather than either sticking or falling freely, because of a physical effect called eddy current braking.
The caveat is that this test only rules things out. Brass, copper and nickel are not magnetic either, so passing the magnet test does not prove the piece is silver.
4. Weight and displacement
Silver is dense — 10.49 grams per cubic centimetre. If a piece looks substantial but feels light in the hand, that is a problem. For anything solid, you can do better than intuition: weigh it, then measure how much water it displaces. Divide the weight in grams by the displaced volume in millilitres. Sterling silver comes out around 10.3. Brass comes in near 8.5, and anything hollow or resin-cored will be far lower.
5. Tarnish behaviour
Real silver tarnishes. It reacts with sulphur in the air and darkens over months into a warm grey-black. This is normal and reversible with a polish cloth. A piece that stays permanently, unnaturally bright after a year of wear has almost certainly been rhodium-plated or is not silver at all. Conversely, plated items tarnish in patches and eventually reveal a different-coloured metal underneath at the edges and high points, which solid silver never does.
What we do about this
We are a family silver business in Coimbatore and we work in 92.5 sterling. Two things we do that you can hold us to. First, the real weight in grams is printed on every product page before you buy — not an approximate range, the actual weight of the piece you will receive. Weigh it on any jeweller's scale when it arrives. Second, a purity certificate ships with every order.
If a seller will not tell you the weight before you pay, that is the question worth pushing on. Weight is where silver is quietly diluted, and it is the number that is easiest to verify the moment the parcel is open.
You can browse what we make in silver idols, temple jewellery and pieces under 5,000, or read our full purity guarantee.