How to Identify Real Silver and Genuine Depression Glass

Reading silver marks

Flip any silver piece over and the marks stamped into the base tell you almost everything — what it's made of, and often where and roughly when.

American pieces are simple by design. If a piece is sterling, it's stamped with the word "Sterling" — no symbols to decode. No word means it's almost certainly plate; nobody makes something out of solid silver and forgets to say so. On pieces from roughly the mid-20th century on, you'll also often see 925 stamped alongside — the international standard marking for 92.5% pure silver.

British pieces use a fuller hallmark system that's been in continuous use since 1300. The mark that actually matters most is the lion passant — a small walking lion shown in profile. That lion is the only mark that confirms genuine British sterling; without it, ornate-looking marks don't mean much. A full hallmark set also includes a town mark identifying which assay office tested the piece.

Two more marks worth knowing at a glance:

• EPNS (Electroplated Nickel Silver) — despite the name, this contains no actual silver in the base metal at all. It's a copper/nickel/zinc alloy with a thin silver electroplate on top. It's a trade description, not an official hallmark.
• Coin silver — roughly 90% pure silver, the American standard before sterling (92.5%) became dominant. You'll see it on older American pieces.

The magnet test: useful, but only in one direction

Pure silver isn't magnetic, so if a magnet grabs a piece firmly, you've caught an obvious fake with a steel core — that part of the test is real and worth doing. The catch: most common plating base metals — copper, brass, nickel silver, aluminum, and a lot of stainless steel — are also non-magnetic. A piece passing the magnet test could still easily be silver-plated rather than solid. Use it to rule out the crude fakes, not to confirm the real thing — the marks above do that job.

Depression glass and the UV test

You'll hear that Depression glass glows green under a blacklight, and for some of it, that's completely true — uranium-containing glass fluoresces a distinctive bright yellow-green under UV, reliably and dramatically.

What gets left out: most Depression glass contains no uranium at all. Pink, blue, clear, amber, and most green production runs were colored with iron or chromium, not uranium, by major makers of the era. Only true "Vaseline"/canary glass, custard glass, and a minority of specific green runs actually contain uranium and will glow. A piece that doesn't light up under a blacklight isn't necessarily fake or modern — it may just be a color that was never made with uranium in the first place. The UV test only tells you something for the specific glass types where uranium was actually used.

The pattern across all of this

Every quick test — the magnet, the blacklight, a single dovetail joint — catches something real, but only within a narrow lane. None of them work as a universal yes/no answer on their own. Read the actual marks, know which test applies to which material, and stack more than one signal before you trust a price tag. For furniture-specific dating, see our guide to dovetails and joinery, and for the broader authentication picture, our guide to spotting fakes and reproductions.

A note on this post: these are general silver and glass identification facts, cross-checked against gemological and museum conservation sources (the International Gem Society, the Oak Ridge Associated Universities Health Physics Museum, the Corning Museum of Glass) rather than Brimfield-specific reporting — they apply anywhere you're evaluating a piece, not just at this show.