Legal and analytical instruments in Italy and Europe that guarantee the goldsmith's product

Considering the extreme variability of the goldsmith’s product in commerce, in many countries it is the law that establishes, rigorously, what finenesses are permitted for marketing, the criteria to be adopted to discover the fineness itself and any criteria for its checking.The official methods of analysis for ascertaining the fineness of the raw materials and of works in precious metals are indicated by the laws. The method of cupellation, one of the oldest for recognizing the amount of gold in alloys, was standardized by the International Organization for Standardization (standard ISO 11426/1993). It currently represents the reference method of analysis for determining the fineness in gold of all types of materials. However, other official analysis methods may also be considered: all those envisaged by the standards issued by national or international standardization commissions that present a degree of uncertainty equal to or less than those dictated by the law itself, such as Inductively-Coupled-Plasma Atomic Emission Spectrometry (ICP-AES), Laser-Induced Plasma Spectroscopy (LIPS), Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS), and X-Ray Fluorescence Spectrometry.