Gold Heart Pendants: Four Checks Before You Buy One
A heart is the easiest shape in jewellery to make look expensive and the hardest to judge by eye. Two hearts of the same size, same colour, same shine can hold completely different amounts of gold, and one of them might hold none at all.
It takes about a minute to tell them apart at the counter. Here is what to actually do.
Why hearts specifically
The shape is curved on every face, which means it catches light from any angle and looks substantial without needing to be. That is exactly what makes it the shape most often made hollow, and the shape most often plated.
Neither of those is a problem on its own. Hollow 916 is real gold. Plated is not gold in any sense that matters. The problem is only ever being sold one while paying for the other.
Check one: find the stamp
On a pendant the stamp is almost never on the front. Look inside the bail, which is the loop the chain passes through, and then on the flat reverse near the lower edge. It will say 916, or sometimes 22K.
Ask for a loupe. Every goldsmith has one and handing it over should not be a negotiation. If nobody can point to the stamp on the piece in front of you, you have your answer and it did not cost anything to get it. We set out the full set of tests, and what each one misses, in how to spot fake 916 gold.
Check two: weigh it against its size
This is the one most people skip, and it is the one that tells you the most.
Ask for the gram weight, then look at the piece. A heart the size of a thumbnail that weighs under a gram is hollow. That is fine if you know it, and the price should reflect it, because you are paying for grams.
Hollow is not a trick. It is how you get a piece with visible presence at a price that works, and the gold in it is the same 91.6% as the gold in a solid one. We explain the construction properly in is a hollow rope chain real gold. The only thing that matters is that hollow is priced as hollow.
Check three: run a fingernail over the seam
A hollow heart is two shells soldered together. There is a seam around the edge where they meet, and on a well-made piece you can feel it faintly and barely see it.
On a badly made one you can catch a fingernail on it. That is where a hollow piece eventually splits, usually after a few years of being knocked against a desk. If the seam is rough, the piece will not last, whatever it is made of.
Check four: look at the bail, not the heart
The bail does all the work. It carries the weight of the pendant and it rubs against the chain every time the wearer moves.
A bail that is noticeably thinner than the chain it hangs on will wear through first, and when it goes the pendant goes with it. On a gift this matters more than anything about the heart itself, because a pendant that falls off is lost rather than broken.
The reframe: ask what it weighs, not what it costs
The question people ask first is the price. The question that tells you something is the gram weight, because the price follows from it:
Price = (gram weight × purity × the day's gold rate) + workmanship + 9% GST
Once you know the weight and the purity, you can work out roughly what the metal in that piece is worth on the day, and whatever sits above that is the making. That is a conversation you can have in any shop in Singapore, and a shop that will not have it is telling you something.
It also explains why jewellery has been getting lighter everywhere as prices rose, which we covered in why gold jewellery keeps getting lighter.
At JJ Gold we will hand you the loupe, show you the stamp, and tell you the exact gram weight before we tell you the price. Everything we sell is real 916 or 999 gold, never plated, hallmarked, with weight and purity written on the receipt. If a piece sits past what you wanted to spend in one go, it can go on Shop Now, Pay Later with up to 12-month instalments through Atome, PayLater by Grab, or SPayLater by Shopee, and we compare what each costs in our instalment guide.
Find the stamp inside the bail or on the reverse. Ask the gram weight and judge it against the size. Feel the seam. Check the bail is not thinner than the chain. Four checks, about a minute, and they work on any heart pendant in any shop.
Bring one you already own and we will weigh it and read the stamp for you, whether or not you buy anything. City Plaza #01-47 (810 Geylang Road, Singapore 409286) or Lucky Plaza #02-47 (304 Orchard Road, Singapore 238863). Call 8950 4377 for the day's rate before you make the trip.
A heart is meant to be given. It should still be on the chain in ten years.