I checked what I thought was a crappy silver plated candle holder and discovered it's sterling. Odd as the color is off as is the feel of it
When silver has that bluish tarnish on it? Does it affect the value of the silver if the item is merely sold for the silver value?
Hell no!
Bluish silver; no problem! Seriously the actual color of the patina being a way to determine the purity of the silver, is NOT a problem to the knowing. IN fact those who know how to buy silver know a lot about how the color and depth and stability of the patina reflects quality.
A fresh polish is always a problem when determining the purity, unless you are able to take a scraping from an unexposed area (if you are not allowed, as a buyer= red flag!!) and use chemicals to assess its purity.
My dad used to do silver plating on musical instruments and he had to have a high purity (sterling at .92 fine was common fake silver! He had to use 0.975 fine, at least) in the bars he bought to use as anodes in his process. (impure bars such as "sterling" meant a spotty plating which always had "weak spots" in the plating. Everything got a slight (half a micron or so) copper flashing to begin, then a nickel flashing (about the same as the copper) to make it more durable, then the actual silver coating).
He had three acids he used (sorry, but chromic, nitric and I can not remember the third) to make sure he was buying the product that would meet the needs of his plating requirements. He could look at an old piece and say that it was good or not so good, by the patina. He knew his shit.
Once the plating process was complete, he would reverse the polarity of the system, agitating the bath overnight and reclaim the silver lost in the acid bath, as it built up on a disposable copper cathode and sell it back to a recycler.
Along in the seventies (with many other techs) he began using a super fast flash of Rhodium (little more expensive, but worth it) to extend the "shininess" of his silver plate jobs. Rhodium made the silver hold its color and shine and you could not actually tell a difference in Rh plated silver and just plain silver, but the Rh plated silver lasted better in the dirty hands of kids who do not take good care of their instruments.
