Tamer Elgamil ·
Karat gets asked about, argued over and stamped on the piece. Then a number appears on the scale and nobody asks what produced it. That second number is where money goes quietly.
A buyer asks about karat before anything else, and the seller is legally required to have it stamped correctly. Then the same buyer watches a number settle on a scale and never asks what produced it.
The price you pay is the karat rate multiplied by the weight. Karat is the audited half of that sum. Weight is the half nobody audits, and that is where a quieter cost can sit. Stones, hollow construction and non-gold hardware all ride in on the same scale.
None of this is illegal by itself. A hollow chain is not fraud and a stone-set ring is not a scam. Jewellery has always combined materials for design reasons. The problem is narrower: the price assumes the whole weight is gold, unless the invoice says otherwise.
The clearest sign that this is not a fringe worry is that one of Egypt's largest gold marketplaces rebuilt its pricing around it. iSagha changed how it prices stone-set jewellery because of what buyers were losing under the older method.
Under that older method, a piece was priced and sold at its full combined weight, stones included. The gap only showed up years later at resale, when a shop deducted the stone weight before paying, and the seller discovered the calculated weight had dropped below what they thought they owned. An attempt in 2005 to patch this, by having companies guarantee to buy pieces back at the original combined weight, fell apart when those companies stopped trading.
Saeed Embabi, iSagha's executive director, framed the current system as a change in how weight is counted rather than a change in fees: gold value is worked out on the actual metal weight from the moment of purchase. The buyer pays for gold and only gold on day one, instead of meeting the difference on the way out.
Egyptian guides to selling used gold describe a consistent routine. Stones come out, the piece is cleaned, and only then does it go on the scale. A waste allowance is taken off on top, for metal assumed lost in any future reshaping.
Not every stone is treated the same way. Some are removed and excluded outright. Others are judged to carry resale value of their own and are handled separately. Which category a given stone falls into is the buyer's judgement on the day. You will not know it in advance. That is the argument for settling the bare metal weight in writing at the counter, years before any of this comes up.
Weight is not only a quiet cost. It is also a documented route for deliberate fraud. Egyptian reporting on gold-market fraud lists tampered scales among the methods in circulation, alongside under-declared karats and plated pieces sold as solid.
This does not mean treating a particular jeweller as a suspect. It means the number on the display is a claim like any other claim, and claims get checked.
Two numbers instead of one, on a piece of paper, is the whole ask. It costs nothing at the counter and it is unrecoverable afterwards.
To run the metal-only arithmetic against a real rate, the calculator turns a weight into a figure at the day's gold price by karat. The sell-back price page shows what that same gram is worth going the other way.
No. Hollow or tube construction, set stones and metal hardware such as clasps all add weight without adding gold, so the gross weight and the metal weight are not the same number.
That depends on the seller. Some Egyptian sellers now price stone-set pieces on the gold weight alone, precisely to avoid disputes at resale. Ask which method is being used before you pay.
Not always. Some stones are removed and excluded from the weight, while others are judged to carry resale value of their own and are treated separately. It is the buyer's call on the day.
The bare metal weight and the gross weight as two separate figures, whether the making charge applies to the gross or the net weight, and the weight of any non-gold hardware.