Skip to content
GEM & GILD

Editorial Policy

What we will and will not publish, where our facts come from, and how we handle being wrong.

By Stephen V.Published How we pick

Independence

Gem & Gild earns affiliate commission from Amazon and nothing else. No brand has paid for a placement, supplied a product, or seen copy before publication. Commission rates do not affect rankings, and every roundup names at least one product we recommend against.

The full commercial picture is on how we make money, including the conflict of interest we do have.

Sourcing rules

Every factual claim on this site traces to one of four things:

  1. A published standard. The US FTC Jewelry Guides (16 CFR Part 23) for material naming and thresholds; ASTM specifications for implant-grade titanium. We cite the primary regulation, not another publisher’s summary of it - every micron and weight-fraction figure on this site was read at the source, which is linked on the page.
  2. A retailer or manufacturer listing, for what a specific product states about itself.
  3. Standard gemological reference data, for hardness and stone properties.
  4. Our own arithmetic, shown in full with every assumption stated, computed from the above.

Where an input is not available, we write “not published” and say what that implies. We do not estimate a figure to fill a table. A seller declining to publish a specification is itself useful information and we treat it that way.

Claims we refuse to make

  • That we tested anything. We have not handled, worn, weighed or measured any product on this site, and we say so on the about page and the methodology.
  • Reviews, ratings or testimonials. There are none anywhere on this site. We have no customers, so any would be invented.
  • Credentials we do not hold. No gemologist, no appraiser, no GIA qualification, no expert panel, no medical review, no editorial staff beyond one writer.
  • Manufactured urgency. No countdowns, no stock warnings, no “deal ends soon”. We do not know those things.
  • Medical advice. We report what materials contain. We do not diagnose allergies or advise on healing piercings, and pages touching those subjects say so explicitly.

Naming materials honestly

This is the site’s central rule and it is worth stating as policy rather than preference:

  • A plated item is called plated, in the product name, in every table and in every mention.
  • Gold-filled is called gold-filled, never “gold”.
  • Gold over sterling with no published thickness is called gold-plated sterling, not vermeil, because we cannot confirm the 2.5-micron threshold.
  • Where a listing says “18K gold plated”, we note that the karat describes the coating.
  • Every product recommendation states what it is made of, how long that realistically lasts, and who should skip it.

Prices

Prices are pulled live from the retailer and rendered with the date they were checked. No price is ever typed into content - the content format has no price field at all, which makes it structurally impossible.

Price data expires after 48 hours. When it does, every number on the site disappears and buttons revert to “Check price”. We would rather show nothing than a stale number, and this is enforced by the code rather than by discipline.

Structured data

We emit Product and Offer structured data for the items we link to, with an Offer node only where a live price exists.

We deliberately do not emit Review or AggregateRating structured data. Our scores are editorial judgments from published specifications, not product review ratings, and marking them up as ratings would contradict our own copy.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, we want to fix it. Email info@gemandgild.com with the page and the problem.

  • Factual errors - a wrong specification, a misquoted threshold, a mis-stated material - are corrected as soon as we can verify the correct figure, and the page’s last updated date changes to reflect it.
  • Material corrections are noted on the page, not made silently. If we got a number wrong, the page will say what changed.
  • Typos and formatting are fixed without a note and without changing the update date.

Review cadence

  • Prices: refreshed daily by an automated process.
  • Product picks: reviewed quarterly. Items go out of stock and rankings go stale.
  • Material and specification pages: reviewed annually, or immediately if a standard changes.
  • The last updated date reflects real content changes only. It does not tick when prices refresh, because that would make the signal meaningless.

Authorship

Everything here is written by Stephen V., framed exactly as he is: someone genuinely interested in the subject who reads the standards and does the arithmetic. There is no editorial team, and we do not imply one.

Gem & Gild is published by Type 5 Marketing LLC.