Handmade sterling silver rings

Size is the whole problem

Everything else about buying a ring is pleasant. The metal is checkable, the maker is often named, the styles are distinct, and good handmade silver sits between ten and seventy dollars, which is a forgiving range. Then there is a number between 4 and 13 that decides whether any of that mattered, and in a gift situation you usually do not have it.

So this page is built around that fact rather than around style. Five of the seven picks are adjustable, wrap or spiral bands that cover a range of sizes instead of one, and the two fixed-size picks are marked clearly as requiring a measurement. That is also why the skip call on this page is not a product — it is a decision.

How to find a size without asking

In rough order of reliability, and all of these beat guessing.

1. Borrow a ring she already wears — on the correct hand and finger — and measure its inside diameter in millimeters. A ring she wears on her right middle finger tells you very little about her left ring finger.
2. Trace the inside of that ring on paper and measure across it. Less precise, and still much better than a guess.
3. Ask someone who would know and will not tell: a sibling, a close friend, a parent. This is the method that gets used and nobody regrets.
4. Buy a cheap plastic sizer strip and have her try it as part of something else entirely. Slightly devious, entirely effective.
5. Buy adjustable. Which is the honest answer for most gifts, and the reason this page leads with one.

Two things to know even once you have a number. Fingers are measurably bigger in heat and after salty food, so a ring fitted on a summer evening may be loose in January. And a wide band needs roughly half a size more than a thin one at the same finger, because there is more metal in contact — which is why width appears in the table below.

Adjustable, wrap and spiral: what each one means

Wrap or adjustable band

An open band whose ends overlap or nearly meet. The wearer squeezes or eases it to fit, and a single ring covers a stated range — typically six sizes. The best compromise for a gift, and the format of our overall pick.

Spiral

A continuous coil with no fixed circumference at all. It genuinely fits any finger, which makes it the safest thing to send blind. It is also the most delicate of the three.

Stacking band

A thin ring designed to be worn two or three at a time. Thin bands tolerate a wider range of fingers comfortably than wide ones do, so the sizing stakes are lower even though each ring is fixed.

Fixed or closed band

A complete circle in one size. The best thing to wear every day — it sits level, does not spin and never needs reshaping — and the worst thing to buy as a surprise.

One honest limitation on the first two: an adjustable band is not meant to be opened and closed daily. Silver work-hardens, and a band reshaped every morning will eventually crack at the overlap. They are adjustable so that one ring fits one person, not so that it can be passed around a table.

925, and the words that are not 925

Sterling silver is 92.5 percent silver alloyed with copper for strength, and it is stamped 925. That is a real standard with a number behind it, and any seller who can claim it will, because it is the most valuable fact they have. Every pick on this page states sterling or 925 on the listing.

The words that are not that: silver plated means a microns-thin layer over a base metal, and it wears through at the knuckle within a year or two — which is worse on a ring than on any other piece of jewelry, because a ring is handled constantly. Silver tone and silver-colored describe a color and nothing else. Nickel silver and German silver contain no silver at all, and nickel is the metal most people with jewelry sensitivities react to. How to tell real sterling silver from plated covers the marks and the simple tests.

What a hand actually leaves behind

Rings are easier to fake convincingly than mugs or boards, because casting from a master model is both a legitimate silversmithing technique and the way mass production works. So the question is not whether a ring was cast — many handmade rings are — but whether a person made the thing you are looking at.

Hammered surfaces are the most reliable tell at this price. A hand-hammered band has marks of slightly different depths at slightly irregular intervals, the light breaks unevenly across it, and no two photographs of the same listing look quite the same. A machine-textured band repeats. Forged and formed shapes — a leaf worked into the band, a spiral drawn and coiled, a wide band wrapped rather than closed — are also hand operations; there is nothing glued and nothing set, which is why they are the hardest to get wrong and the longest-lived.

Where a listing offers one ring in twelve identical finishes with studio lighting and no variation, treat it as production. That is not automatically bad, but it should be labeled, and on this site it is. How to spot resold mass production is the general version of this test, and handmade sterling silver applies it to the wider jewelry category.

Stones, and which ones survive being worn

A ring takes more physical abuse than anything else a person wears — doors, pockets, steering wheels, keyboards. That rules out more stone settings than people expect, and it is the reason the stone pick on this page is an opaque cabochon rather than something faceted.

Opaque stones set flush or in a bezel — turquoise, onyx, lapis, moonstone — are the ones that last, because there is nothing sticking up to catch and the setting wraps the stone rather than gripping it with prongs. They also still look like stones: veined, uneven, different in every piece, impossible to confuse with glass. Faceted stones in raised prong settings are a different purchase with a different lifespan, and at under fifty dollars they are usually cubic zirconia, which is fine as long as nobody is told otherwise.

Width, and why 6 mm is the safe number

Six millimeters is the width that is clearly a ring rather than a wire and clearly not a wedding band, which makes it the safest choice for a gift where you do not know the taste. It is also the width where a hammered surface has enough room to be visible from across a table, which is the whole point of buying a hammered band.

Care: tarnish is not damage

Sterling darkens because the copper in the alloy reacts with sulfur in the air. It is a surface film, it comes off with a polishing cloth in under a minute, and a ring worn daily barely tarnishes at all because skin contact keeps polishing it. Nothing has gone wrong and nothing has been lost.

Two things actually do damage. Chlorine, which attacks the copper in the alloy — take rings off before a pool or a hot tub. And ultrasonic cleaners on anything with a set stone, particularly turquoise, which is porous and can be loosened or discolored. Hand cream and soap build up under a band and in a spinner's moving parts; warm water, a drop of dish soap and a soft brush handles it.

What to buy instead if the size is a mystery

Sometimes the right answer is not a ring. If the size is genuinely unknown, the person is not a ring wearer, or the gift has to be opened in front of other people, these are the categories that carry the same weight without the number: handmade earrings, which have no fit at all, and handmade necklaces, where an adjustable or sliding chain solves the equivalent problem. Handmade gifts for her is the wider shortlist if jewelry is not settled either.

And if the ring is the point and the measurement exists, buy the fitted band. Every adjustable compromise on this page is a compromise; a properly sized closed band is the better object and will be worn longer.