If you are alergic to nickel, wearing the proper Sterling Silver Jewelry may be very important to you. Some Sterling Silver Items have a mixture of nickel and silver, so be aware of what percentage of each base metal is contained with in the item.

Check for the stamping on a particular item. The stamp will normally indicate what pecentage of Sterling Silver is contained, for example 925 Sterling Silver which is 92.5% silver and may be a combination of other materials such as nickel.

So a safe number to look for when shopping for sterling silver items would be 99% Silver which is Fine Sterling Silver Jewelry because it is considered to be pure silver.

Not all Sterling Silver is the same so be sure to indentify whether you are dealing with pure silver - Fine Sterling Silver. <img src="/images/graemlins/laugh.gif" alt="" />

I am extremely allergic to nickel - and you are right, I have had reactions from jewelry that was supposed to be "sterling."

Jewelry should only be stamped with "Sterling" if it's 92.5% pure silver - but I'm afraid with some lower quality pieces, the manufacturers may not be being truthful.

Fine silver is actually just �fine silver,� not sterling - but people do associate with "sterling silver" as being "real" silver, versus metal that is just silver colored. (Which you also have to watch out for!)

The problem with fine silver is that it is so soft that jewelry can be scratched or deformed pretty easily, which is something to consider, too.

Overall, to prevent allergic reactions I recommend not wearing tight-fitting jewelry or earrings for more than about 7 or 8 hours at a time, and not wearing metal jewelry if you�re going to get sweaty. And of course, like you said, try to stick with high quality jewelry only.

Alloy containing 92.5% silver is called sterling silver. Any metal can make up the 7.5% non-silver portion, however the best companion is copper. It improves the metal's hardness and durability without affecting its white color. Some manufactures add a small amount of nickel which causes allergies.
Nowadays many sterling slver jewelry items are offered with Rhodium plating. It can serve as a protection layer.

A new type of gold is out now that does not cause nickel allergies. It is a European type, according to my tattoo/piercing artist. It is a jewelry made from gold but instead of having nickel, which all gold contains a small amount, this has palladium instead of nickel. It makes it possible for those with nickel allerges to wear gold jewerly again, especially in gold.

For those that prefer the silver look, it is available in white gold as well and to me at least, white gold looks like silver anyhow so I can't imagine anyone telling the difference. My daughter loves silver but she does buy a lot of white gold jewelry because it looks like silver and is of better quality than your average piece of silver jewelry. But please, do not consider me as knocking silver pieces. It simply is not my cup of tea, so to speak. My preference is gold but when it comes to nickel problems, even gold has nickel issues except for the latest gold with the nickel-free option of pallidium.

I hope this helps someone out there. I know it has done wonders for me. I actually lost a beautiful navel piercing because I had a bad reaction to surgical steel jewelry. It is a good thing it happened because I had to undergo surgery sometime later and the incident made me aware of the fact I had a severe nickel allergy.

Paise

There are a lot of 99.9% pure silver bracelets, earrings and hairpins, all of them are handmade by the ethnic people from China, you can find them at: http://www.galleriapangea.com/jewelry/handmade_jewelry/products.html

I suggest you buy nickel free jewelry. You can get sterling silver which nickel free. We categorize nickel free jewelry on our site. (about 30% of our silver jewelry is nickel free)

Nickel-free jewelry is recommended for that. We only carry the highest quality .925 nickel-free jewelry.