Can I assume these are gold plated?

[Rmwatson78]

I have a lot of material that is marked .925, but since the color of the material is gold, do I assume it is gold plated or could it be plated with something other than gold that imitates the same look?

 

[nickvc]

I processed 10s of kilos of this sort of material, my advice is to melt it and process in a silver cell, that way the gold reports in the slimes, if you use nitric to recover the silver you will use a lot of nitric and still need to re process the recovered silver for the gold that made it passed the filters, it shouldn't but it does.
Getting the material to run is hard as the silver content is low so the solution fouls quickly, you have to know the tricks to keep the electrolyte high in silver so it still recovers high grade silver and leaves the base metals and gold behind, the base metals will be in the electrolyte and the gold in the slimes, you have to add fresh nitric to the electrolyte to dissolve more silver from that already refined, I got away with running around 50 kilos + from one solution of around 15 litres, it's a balancing act but possible.
The one problem can be PGMs if you have white gold looking silver, there was a time when Pd was used.
It's all good fun but frustrating at times.

 

[upcyclist]

It's likely that it is indeed gold plate over sterling, but test to be sure!

Depending on what you tend to process, another option is to use the gold-plated silver (vermeil) for inquartation. Then the plating is just gravy