Editorial policy

Independence

No brand pays to appear on this site, and no brand has ever seen a draft before publication. There is no sponsored content, no paid review, no advertorial and no rate card.

We earn affiliate commission — that is the whole business model, and it is set out on the disclosure page. Commission rates differ between products. That difference is not an input into any ranking, and the practical proof is that our lists routinely put a cheaper product above a more expensive one that would pay us more.

What we will never claim

These are standing prohibitions rather than aspirations, and they exist because they are the exact lies that are easy to tell in this category:

• That we tested something. We do not test products. We have no lab, own no units, and have worn none of these. Every page says so.
• A credential nobody here holds. No dermatologist, no gemologist, no “medically reviewed by”, no expert panel. One named enthusiast writes this site.
• A rating we invented. There are no star ratings or review counts authored by us anywhere on this site, and no Review or AggregateRating structured data. The visible score on a pick is a disclosure score with a published rubric, and it is labeled as such everywhere it appears.
• A price we remember. Prices come from a live feed with a 48-hour expiry. Nothing is typed into the copy.
• A nickel-release figure for a specific product. Unless the manufacturer published one, in which case we quote the manufacturer and say we are quoting them.

Sourcing standards

Preferred: regulations and standards cited by name and number (REACH Annex XVII entry 27, EN 1811, ASTM F-136), and the manufacturer’s own published spec for a given product.

Acceptable with attribution: peer-reviewed or clinical sources for general facts, named inline.

Not acceptable as evidence: another review site’s blog post. During research for this site we found a large retailer sourcing its nickel-content figures to three competitors’ blogs, none of which cited a primary source either. If a fact only exists on someone else’s blog, we either find the primary source or we do not state the fact.

Product material claims are always attributed to whoever made them. We report that a seller says a post is titanium. We do not independently assert that it is.

The medical boundary

This is a shopping site that happens to touch on an allergy, and the line matters. We describe materials and reactions in general consumer terms and cite public sources. We do not diagnose, do not tell you whether you have a nickel allergy, and do not recommend treatment. Where a reader plainly needs clinical help — an infection, a reaction that will not settle, anything spreading — we say so and stop.

Update cadence

• Daily: live price and availability across every pick, automatically.
• Monthly: every roundup, checked that its picks are still sold and still described the same way by the seller.
• Quarterly: every material and comparison page, with standards citations re-verified.
• Annually: these trust pages, against what the site actually does.

Every page carries a verified on date driven by real content dates rather than by the last deployment. Because prices refresh daily, the site redeploys daily — and a page that claimed to be freshly reviewed every time a price moved would be lying in a small, corrosive way.

Corrections

We correct errors in place and leave a dated note at the foot of the affected page saying what changed and when. We do not silently edit a factual claim after publication.

If you are a manufacturer and we have described your material incorrectly, write to info@gentlecarat.com with the published spec you would like us to use. We report what a listing states, so if the listing is what is wrong, the fastest fix is usually on your end — and we will re-check and update within a week of being told.

Comments, reviews and user content

This site publishes no user reviews, no testimonials and no comments. If it ever does, they will be real, attributed, and unedited apart from removing abuse — and the fact that they are user-submitted will be obvious on the page.