• Do a Touch test. This is a quick spot test that one can do especially before buying anything made from silk. The idea is to rub the silk with your hands. If you feel warmth on rubbing it, it's real. With artificial or synthetic silk, it is impossible to experience warmth on rubbing.
• Perform a Wedding Ring Test. If the silk that you are planning to buy is not very heavy, this test is perfect! Genuine silk of lower ply can be easily threaded and pulled through a wedding ring because silk is naturally flexible and smooth. On the other hand, artificial silks would scrunch up and would be impossible to pull through.
• Consider the price. Of course, genuine silk is always significantly costlier than the synthetic ones. Sometimes the synthetic silk is priced much higher and looks like silk to an untrained eye but mostly low price is a very good indication of its being fake.
• Burn Test. This is perhaps the best and most definitive test to find genuine silk. You can take a few threads from the material and burn it with a flame. Genuine silk burns with smell of burnt hair. When you burn the edge of real silk fabric, the flame is invisible and it will stop burning as soon as the flame is removed. The ash produced hence, is black, crispy and brittle. It turns to powder when twisted in fingers.With the artificial silk, it is quite the opposite. When synthetic silk is burnt, there is a flame and smell of plastic. No ash is produced.
• Chemical Test. Real silk dissolves in bleach, while fake silk does not.

The sample fabric below is included in our package for Burn Test, Chemical Test, and Washing Test.

Your pillow will have a tag noting its size (standard and queen size pillows are easy to confuse) so double-check your pillow size before purchasing a silk pillowcase. Similarly, there is a wide choice of colors when buying your silk pillowcase. White or ivory go with almost everything, but a pop of color may be a welcome addition to your bedroom décor.