How do you identify a necklace or ring from a video?

Stop trying to name the brand and start naming the parts, because the parts are what a shop search box understands. Take the clearest frozen frame you can get and work out three things: the chain family or setting style, the approximate length or width, and the metal tier. Chain families have fixed names that every retailer uses, so cable, curb, Figaro, rope, box, snake, herringbone and paperclip are search terms rather than descriptions. Necklace lengths follow a standard scale too, with collar at about 14 inches, choker at 16, princess at 18, matinee at 20 to 24 and opera at 28 to 36, so where a chain sits on the wearer gives you a starting filter. The one thing no frame will tell you is the karat, because karat is a property of the alloy and not something a camera can see.

What is the difference between solid gold, gold filled, vermeil and gold plated?

They are four different amounts of gold on the same shape. Solid gold means the whole item is a gold alloy, with the karat number stating the proportion. Gold filled, under the US Federal Trade Commission's jewelry guides, means a karat gold layer bonded to a base metal that makes up at least one twentieth of the weight of the metal in the article, which is why it is stamped as a fraction such as 1/20 14K GF. Vermeil means a sterling silver base coated with gold of at least 10 karat fineness, at a minimum thickness of 2.5 microns on all significant surfaces. Gold electroplate is a coating with an FTC floor of 0.175 microns, with heavy gold electroplate set at 2.5 microns, and anything thinner than that floor should be described as gold flashed or gold washed. Gold filled is measured as a share of the object's weight; plating is measured in fractions of a micron.

Can you tell if jewellery is real gold from a photo?

No. Colour is not evidence, because plated brass, vermeil and 14 karat gold are all engineered to look like the same warm yellow, and polished metal reflects the light in the room rather than showing its own colour. A warm ring light will make a silver-toned chain read as gold on camera. The only visual evidence that means anything is a quality stamp, which sits on a clasp tab, the inside of a band or the back of a pendant, is typically a millimetre or so tall, and does not survive being filmed from across a room. Get the answer from the listing rather than the footage, and ask the seller directly whether the piece is solid, filled, vermeil or plated, and what the base metal is.

Does a karat stamp on its own prove the metal?

Not by itself, at least in the United States. Under the National Gold and Silver Stamping Act, a manufacturer or dealer who applies a quality mark to an article must also apply their own trademark, registered or applied for in the US, so that the claim is traceable to somebody who can be held to it. A karat number with no maker's mark beside it is an incomplete claim rather than a guarantee, and a stamp is in any case trivially easy to apply to base metal. Treat a stamp as a starting point, and for anything expensive have a jeweller test the metal rather than relying on the marking.

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Jewellery has one look and four price tiers

September 15, 2026 · 7 min read

A clay-style balance scale weighing a small bottle against a stack of gold coins

You are not going to get the brand off a two-second clip of a moving chain. Get the tier instead.

Solid gold, gold filled, vermeil, plated brass. The same necklace exists in all four. They look identical on camera, they photograph identically in the listing, and the gap between the top and the bottom of that list is the whole decision. The brand is the question everyone asks. The tier is the question that costs you money.

Why jewellery defeats visual search

Every jewellery identifier tool you will find wants a sharp photo of the piece sitting still, ideally in your hand, with the clasp and the stamp in frame. You have a creator turning her head under a ring light. Those are different problems, and only one of them has been solved.

Four things go wrong at once. A chain link is a few millimetres across, so a video frame gives it a few dozen pixels. Polished metal is a mirror, which means it does not photograph its own colour so much as the colour of the room, and a warm ring light will make a silver-toned chain read gold. The piece moves, and the informative parts, the clasp and the back of the pendant, spend the clip behind her hair. And if you do catch a clean frame, what you have is a silhouette that several hundred sellers manufacture.

The screenshot-then-search workflow is still worth doing. A visual search is genuinely good at naming a chain family or a setting style from a clear still, and a name is exactly what you need next. We wrote about where image search wins and where video breaks it separately. What no image tool can do is read karat, because karat is a fact about the alloy and not a thing that has an appearance.

Four tiers wearing the same photograph

In the US these words are defined rather than decorative. The Federal Trade Commission's jewelry guides set out what each of them is supposed to mean:

Solid gold. The whole object is a gold alloy, and the karat number is the proportion of gold in it. 14K, 18K, or the same thing written as 585 and 750.
Gold filled. A karat gold layer mechanically bonded to a base metal, where the gold is at least one twentieth of the weight of the metal in the article. That is why it is stamped as a fraction, 1/20 12K GF or 1/20 14K GF.
Vermeil. A sterling silver base coated with gold of at least 10 karat fineness, at a minimum thickness of 2.5 microns on all significant surfaces. The base is precious. The gold is a coat.
Gold electroplate. A coating with a floor of 0.175 microns. Call it heavy gold electroplate and the floor is 2.5 microns. Thinner than the floor and the honest words are gold flashed or gold washed, which means decorative.
Costume. Brass, steel or zinc in a gold colour, with no claim attached and usually no stamp either.

Read the units next to each other, because that is where the answer is. Gold filled is defined as a share of the object's weight. Plating is defined in fractions of a micron, and household kitchen foil is tens of microns thick. Those two things arrive looking the same. They are not the same object, and a year of wearing it will tell you which one you bought.

None of this makes plated jewellery a scam. It makes it a category with a price attached. The bad outcome is paying a filled price for a flashed object because the listing photo matched the video exactly, which it would, because both of them are photographs of gold-coloured metal.

Say it in the seller's words

Once you have given up on the brand, you need the trade vocabulary, because a shop's search box is matching your characters against a title somebody typed. Three groups of words cover most of it.

Chain families. Cable is plain oval links. Curb, and its heavier cousin Cuban, is twisted links that lie flat. Figaro runs one long link then three short ones. Rope is two strands twisted together. Box is square links. Snake is a smooth continuous tube. Herringbone is a flat ribbon that kinks if you look at it wrong. Paperclip is long rectangles.
Lengths. The scale is standard: collar around 14 inches, choker 16, princess 18, matinee 20 to 24, opera 28 to 36. A chain sitting at the base of the throat is a 16, one just below the collarbone is an 18. Treat it as a filter rather than a fact, since the same necklace sits differently on different people.
Settings, for rings and tennis pieces. Prong is claws holding the stone up. Bezel is a metal rim all the way around it. Pavé is tiny stones set close along the band. Halo is a ring of small stones around a bigger one. Channel sits stones flush between two walls. Tension looks like the stone is floating.

Then use those words the way a product title uses them, shortest useful phrase first, attributes in the filters rather than the query. The general method is in the post on searching when you do not know the name. Jewellery is the category where it pays off most, because the vocabulary is unusually fixed. Almost every seller calls a Figaro a Figaro.

The stamp you cannot read on camera

The real evidence exists. It is on a clasp tab, inside a band, or on the back of a pendant, it is about a millimetre tall, and it was never going to survive being filmed across a living room. So stop hunting for it in the footage and go get it from the listing.

There is a rule behind that stamp worth knowing. Under the US National Gold and Silver Stamping Act, anyone applying a quality mark to an article has to apply their own trademark alongside it, registered or applied for in the US, so the claim traces back to someone accountable. A karat number floating on its own is an incomplete claim. And a stamp is easy to press into base metal, so for anything expensive, a jeweller's test is the only thing that settles it.

The question that actually works is boring and short. Is it solid, filled, vermeil or plated, and what is the base metal? A seller with solid gold answers that in one line. A listing whose description runs “18K gold plated stainless steel, luxury, hypoallergenic” has already answered it too. So has one that reaches for gold-tone, gold colour or gold finish, which are three ways of not saying gold.

Pick the tier for how you will wear it

The tier is not a quality ranking, it is a match to a habit. Something that goes on in the morning and stays on through the shower, the gym and the sea wants to be solid or filled. Something for occasional wear can be plated, and there is nothing wrong with that as long as you paid plated money for it. We took the general version of this apart in the post on when a cheaper version is worth it, and jewellery is close to the cleanest example: the cheap one is genuinely identical until contact wears the coating through.

One more reason to ask about the base metal. Reactions to nickel in costume jewellery are common enough that the base is worth knowing before you buy, not after your ear tells you. That is not medical advice and we are not qualified to give any. It is just the one question a listing will answer for free.

What we can and cannot do here

Stealsy takes the video and does the finding part. Share a clip from TikTok or Instagram and it reads the footage, the audio, the on-screen text, the caption and the comments, pulls out the products, prices them, and opens every shop link on our servers to check it resolves before you ever see it. Where a cheaper version of the same look exists, it shows that beside the original. Heart something instead of buying it and it watches the price.

The limit, said plainly: we cannot read karat off a video either. Nobody can. No tool that looks at pixels can tell you what an alloy is made of, and any tool that claims to is guessing. What we can do is get you from a two-second clip to a live listing, quickly, where the tier is written down in words the seller is legally answerable for. That is where the answer was the whole time. The video was never going to have it.

It is iPhone only, iOS 18 or later, and free to try.

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Common questions

How do you identify a necklace or ring from a video?: Stop trying to name the brand and start naming the parts, because the parts are what a shop search box understands. Take the clearest frozen frame you can get and work out three things: the chain family or setting style, the approximate length or width, and the metal tier. Chain families have fixed names that every retailer uses, so cable, curb, Figaro, rope, box, snake, herringbone and paperclip are search terms rather than descriptions. Necklace lengths follow a standard scale too, with collar at about 14 inches, choker at 16, princess at 18, matinee at 20 to 24 and opera at 28 to 36, so where a chain sits on the wearer gives you a starting filter. The one thing no frame will tell you is the karat, because karat is a property of the alloy and not something a camera can see.
What is the difference between solid gold, gold filled, vermeil and gold plated?: They are four different amounts of gold on the same shape. Solid gold means the whole item is a gold alloy, with the karat number stating the proportion. Gold filled, under the US Federal Trade Commission's jewelry guides, means a karat gold layer bonded to a base metal that makes up at least one twentieth of the weight of the metal in the article, which is why it is stamped as a fraction such as 1/20 14K GF. Vermeil means a sterling silver base coated with gold of at least 10 karat fineness, at a minimum thickness of 2.5 microns on all significant surfaces. Gold electroplate is a coating with an FTC floor of 0.175 microns, with heavy gold electroplate set at 2.5 microns, and anything thinner than that floor should be described as gold flashed or gold washed. Gold filled is measured as a share of the object's weight; plating is measured in fractions of a micron.
Can you tell if jewellery is real gold from a photo?: No. Colour is not evidence, because plated brass, vermeil and 14 karat gold are all engineered to look like the same warm yellow, and polished metal reflects the light in the room rather than showing its own colour. A warm ring light will make a silver-toned chain read as gold on camera. The only visual evidence that means anything is a quality stamp, which sits on a clasp tab, the inside of a band or the back of a pendant, is typically a millimetre or so tall, and does not survive being filmed from across a room. Get the answer from the listing rather than the footage, and ask the seller directly whether the piece is solid, filled, vermeil or plated, and what the base metal is.
Does a karat stamp on its own prove the metal?: Not by itself, at least in the United States. Under the National Gold and Silver Stamping Act, a manufacturer or dealer who applies a quality mark to an article must also apply their own trademark, registered or applied for in the US, so that the claim is traceable to somebody who can be held to it. A karat number with no maker's mark beside it is an incomplete claim rather than a guarantee, and a stamp is in any case trivially easy to apply to base metal. Treat a stamp as a starting point, and for anything expensive have a jeweller test the metal rather than relying on the marking.