We didn't set out to write a takedown. We set out to answer a simple question before we wrote our own warranty: when demi-fine jewellery fails, how does it fail, and what do the brands selling it actually promise when it does? So we went through it — independent reviews, warranty pages, buyback terms, across every major player in this category. The pattern wasn't subtle.

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The Pattern We Found

Scroll the reviews on almost any demi-fine brand in India — including the ones with the biggest ad budgets — and one complaint outnumbers every other combined, in some version of the same five words: "turned black in a month." It shows up on brands selling at ₹600. It shows up on brands selling at ₹15,000. It shows up often enough that it stops looking like bad luck and starts looking like a category-wide habit nobody's fixed.

The Warranty Trick Almost Nobody Talks About

Here's the part that actually surprised us. "Lifetime warranty" is on nearly every homepage in this space. Almost none of them tell you, above the fold, what it doesn't cover.

One of the most recognised names in global demi-fine writes its warranty to specifically exclude tarnishing and fading of the metal — by a wide margin, the single most common reason a customer would ever need to use a warranty in the first place. Read that twice. The warranty covers manufacturing defects. It doesn't cover the thing that's actually likely to go wrong.

A different pattern shows up in several buyback programs in this category: the payout shrinks the longer you've owned the piece. A piece returned within the first six months might get back half its invoice value; wait past the one-year mark, and that can drop to a fraction of that. The structure rewards moving fast and quietly penalises the customer who actually wore the piece — which is exactly when tarnish tends to show up in the first place.

We're not naming names. You can check any of this yourself — it's all sitting in public reviews and published warranty pages. We just don't think most buyers have the time to go digging through both before they spend.

What We Built Instead

So here's DORI's version, stated plainly, with nothing excluded in the fine print:

• 2 years of warranty coverage — tarnishing and fading included, not excluded. If the gold layer wears through and the silver underneath reacts, we re-plate it. That's the actual failure mode this category sees most, and it's the one we built the warranty around, not away from.
• Not happy with a piece? We'll take it back. 15 days free return and exchanges. 

No asterisk pointing to a clause that excludes the one thing you were worried about. No buyback that quietly pays back less than you'd expect, later than you'd expect.

Why We're Comfortable Saying This Out Loud

This isn't a marketing flourish we can't back up. It's structural: DORI is genuine 18kt gold vermeil — 2.5+ microns — on real 925 sterling silver, BIS hallmarked, made small enough in scale that standing behind a re-plating promise doesn't break the business the way it might for a brand shipping hundreds of thousands of units a month. Being smaller is usually framed as a disadvantage. Here, it's the reason we can actually mean what we promise.

The Bottom Line

Every brand in this category will tell you their jewellery is built to last. Fewer will tell you, before you buy, exactly what happens if it doesn't. We'd rather you know that part now, while you're still deciding — not eleven months in, reading the fine print for the first time.