Lead Free Jewelry Compliance
Many of our customers have been concerned this year about a new Federal law called Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA) that mandates all jewelry sold to children 12 and under be tested and certified as “lead free” within the limits of that law. Jewelry artists who sell their products in California also need to comply California’s Lead Containing Jewelry Law passed there in 2008 governing the use of lead in any jewelry sold within the state to any age group.
Additionally, there are laws governing the use of nickel in jewelry on the books in both the United Kingdom and the European union.
The jewelry industry has been scrambling to come up with ways to provide guidance to designers and artists to help them understand and comply with these new laws. We have decided to post “Lead Classification” and “Nickel Status” information for all of our products. The first store to contain this information is ChoiceJewelrySupplies.com. We will be adding them to our other stores in the coming months. Since our metal components are the most critical ones, we started with them first. We hope to have them posted on all metal components on abeadstore.com soon.
You will now find new fields in the detailed items description that indicate the Lead Classification for each product using the California classification system. You will also find the Nickel Status for each item. Please take time to read our explanations about what the Lead Classes and Nickel Status means.
To net this out a bit for you, the California laws are written so the parts that are still most likely to contain lead are base metal beads and findings. In some cases, they are lead free, in other cases, we simply don’t know because they have not been tested. In other cases, they are not lead free. If we don’t know about an item, we mark it as such. Compliance does not seem to be a high threshold if you pay attention to the parts you are buying.
Regarding the Federal laws on lead free jewelry for children, we don’t know why you would want sell your products into that market with the current law. Just so we are clear, the parts we sell are not intended to be used in products sold to children.
From what we read, you would need to test each and every item you make yourself to certify its compliance regardless of the information provided by manufacturers and distributors. That’s just what we infer and what many industry leaders have concluded. You make your own judgement, but right now its set up for large manufacturers of very consistent lines of jewelry to succeed and not for individual designers and artists who make unique pieces. There seems to be way to much liability you would be exposed to. The good news is there are plenty of other jewelry buyers out there for you to sell to besides kids!
Read more from the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA)- Section 101 and the California Department of Toxic Substance Control about these laws.
These new Solid Copper Beadcaps pictured below are linked to the detail page containing the lead and nickel status information. You will find links to the explanatory information from each of these pages.
