With the combination of both metals, sterling silver is also hypoallergenic, making it perfect for earrings and rings. Plated silver, on the other hand, is often created with nickel, which can easily irritate the skin, covered by a layer of pure silver. This means that silver plating is not as hypoallergenic as other types of silver. Genuine sterling silver is labeled sterling because it must contain at least 92.5% pure silver.
However, the remaining 7.5% can be filled with other types of metal. Most of the time, the remaining percentage is copper. Copper is great because it is also an anti-allergenic metal. Sterling silver is an alloy composed of 92.5% silver and 7.5% of other metals, usually copper.
It's not known to cause metal allergies, so it's considered one of the safest materials for people susceptible to contact dermatitis. Most sterling silver jewelry is hypoallergenic. This means it should be fine, even for people with sensitive skin. The pieces of jewelry that you should avoid are those that mix allergenic metals, such as nickel, with silver to make their alloys.
If you are allergic to nickel, the best thing to do is to select solid sterling silver jewelry. Sterling silver has a quality seal with.
Pure silver
is too soft for use in jewelry because it bends and stretches easily, causing designs to deform quickly. To improve the strength and durability of pure silver, jewelers create sterling silver by mixing 92.5% pure silver with 7.5% copper.Companies with a bad reputation, or retailers that supposedly sell sterling silver at prices much lower than those offered by the competition, could be making a profit by including nickel in their jewelry. Although silver-plated jewelry contains a much thicker coating and represents a significant increase in quality compared to silver-plated jewelry, this thicker layer of silver plating doesn't guarantee that you won't develop an allergic reaction to the base metal underneath. Silver-plated jewelry contains a thin layer of silver bonded to a base metal, such as brass, nickel or tin. This is the most important question you can ask yourself when you want to know if a piece of sterling silver jewelry is hypoallergenic.
This is why most high-quality jewelry manufacturers make their sterling silver alloy by combining 7.5% copper with 92.5% pure silver. If you're wondering if sterling silver is hypoallergenic, you should also take a look at the other metals in sterling and find out if you're allergic to copper or nickel. People who have asked if sterling silver is hypoallergenic often know that they are allergic to silver and often don't understand that they are actually only allergic to one of the other metals that combine to make their silver jewelry. This reaction, inappropriately called silver allergy, is actually caused by the nickel in the alloy, since pure silver is naturally hypoallergenic.
Copper is relatively cheap, which also helps keep the price of sterling silver alloy jewelry as low as possible. But many people wonder if sterling silver is hypoallergenic. This question goes beyond semantics. These metals are generally not known to cause reactions in people with hypersensitive skin, so it's normally safe to assume that sterling silver is actually hypoallergenic.
Silver-plated jewelry is essentially a thicker layer of silver plating, supposedly thick enough that it won't come off. Jewelry can be misleadingly labeled as “nickel-free” or “hypoallergenic” because these terms can also be used to describe only the silver part of a design. .
