Salt, Water, and Eight Days: Testing Our 18K PVD Titanium Steel
Every piece of jewelry meets the same quiet enemies: salt from the skin, moisture from the air, the small accumulated friction of being worn. Most of what we're asked about a finish — will it fade, will it turn my skin green, will it still look like this in a year — comes down to how that finish handles exposure over time.
We wanted an answer we could stand behind, not just repeat. So we ran our own test.
What 18K PVD Titanium Steel Actually Means
The two words that matter most here are vacuum-plated, not electroplated.
Most gold-finish jewelry on the market is electroplated — a thin layer of gold bonded to a base metal through an electric current in a liquid solution. It's a well-established process, but the resulting layer is often thin and comparatively soft, which is part of why so much gold-plated jewelry dulls or wears through within a year of regular use.
PVD — physical vapor deposition — works differently. Inside a vacuum chamber, titanium and gold are vaporized and bonded to the metal surface at a molecular level. The result is a finish that's harder, denser, and more tightly adhered than traditional plating. It's the same category of coating used in watchmaking and some surgical instruments, chosen specifically for durability under repeated wear.
We use 18K PVD titanium steel for the structural components across our pieces — chains, clasps, extenders — the parts that carry the most contact and stress in daily wear.
Why We Tested It Ourselves
Claims about durability are easy to make and hard to verify. We didn't want to simply repeat industry language about PVD being "long-lasting" without knowing, specifically, how our own findings held up under conditions harsher than daily wear.
So we designed a simple accelerated test: fully assembled pieces — ear hooks, chain, lobster clasps — submerged in a 10% concentration saltwater solution for 8 days. A separate, untouched control group was kept dry throughout for direct comparison. Sweat and everyday moisture are nowhere near this concentration; this was designed to compress a much longer period of ordinary wear into a short, controlled window.
We photographed and filmed the pieces at several points across the test period, comparing submerged samples against the dry control group throughout.
The solution itself tells its own story. Eight days at this concentration produced visible sediment and cloudiness — a clear sign of how aggressive the environment was compared to anything the jewelry would encounter on skin.
What We Found
After 8 days, the difference was minimal.
Chains and ear hooks showed no visible change in color or shine when compared to the untouched control group. Lobster clasps — which have more surface complexity and more solder points than a simple chain link — showed a slight darkening on close inspection, though the structure and finish remained fully intact. No flaking, no peeling, no loss of luster.
In each picture, left: Submerged in 10% saltwater for 8 days · Right: Untreated control group
What This Means for Everyday Wear
To be clear about scale: nothing in daily life comes close to 8 days in 10% saltwater. Sweat, humidity, an ocean swim, a humid climate — all of it sits well below the intensity of this test. What we ran here was a stress test, not a simulation of normal use.
What it tells us is this: the structural components of our pieces — built in 18K PVD titanium steel — hold their finish under conditions well beyond what daily wear will ever ask of them.
Full video documentation of this test is available on our Instagram.
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