In a small shop lined with glass cases of gleaming chains and rings, a customer’s trust in a jeweller has always come down to a simple, unspoken promise: that the karat stamped on a receipt matches the karat in what they buy. Now, that promise carries the weight of an approved national standard.
The Guyana National Bureau of Standards (GNBS) has developed a new standard for gold, silver and platinum jewellery, setting out requirements for testing, labelling and determining the purity of precious metals. For an industry long built on reputation and word of mouth, jewellers and goldsmiths across Georgetown say the move could formalise something they have always tried to guarantee.
“When someone is purchasing 12 karat, 14 karat or even 18 karat, they should be confident that they receive exactly what they pay for,” said Mark Luke, a jeweller at Nazeem’s Jewelry. “It’s standards like these that keep the jewellery industry and jewellers as a whole with great trust and accountability for their customers.”
Behind the counter at A&N Exclusive Jewellery and Fashion Paradise, goldsmith Andrew Rampersaud sees the standard playing out in a different, more hands-on way — in the moment a customer walks in clutching raw gold, hoping to have it transformed into something new.
“That’s very good, because once the GNBS gets involved, you know that when a customer comes to purchase, they get the standard that they look for,” he said.
It is a more complicated process than it appears. Raw gold, Rampersaud explained, is measured by percentage rather than weight alone, meaning a calculation is required before it can be melted, shaped and reborn as jewellery. The new standard sets clear requirements for determining and indicating the purity of that finished piece, replacing guesswork with a guarantee.
The standard reaches beyond the counter and into questions of safety, addressing the quality of metals used in jewellery and setting safeguards against harmful impurities — a concern Luke insists is far from cosmetic.
“Jewellery is often directly worn against the skin for long periods, so quality and safety should always be taken very seriously,” he said. “Proper testing helps to ensure that the metal used in jewellery meets the required standards and gives customers great peace of mind about the pieces they are wearing.”
For Rampersaud, purity is not only a matter of consumer confidence but of craftsmanship itself. In the workshop, impurities are not an abstract concern — they are the difference between gold that bends to a goldsmith’s hands and gold that breaks in them.
“As a goldsmith, if you are working and you have impurities, it causes the jewellery to break. So we have a milling process — when you pass the metal through the mill, it would start to break up. It’s very hard to work once it has impurities,” he said.
