A while back I saw these 14K Gold Plated Staples and mentioned them in a post, and I had a few people mention that they wanted to see a review.  Who am I to deprive people of their review of some opulent gold plated office supplies like these?  So here they are, presented in a nice black velvet jewelry box.  You are looking at 25 (labeled as 24, but I counted 3 times) 14K gold plated staples.  The first question most people have will be the price, so although I don’t usually go there because on most items we review, prices tend to change and different people have different ideas of whats “reasonable” and whats not in terms of pricing.  Before we get into the detailed review, lets talk price.

There are a few factors here in terms of the cost, but once I explain you will understand the significance of the above photo of the 25 gold plated staples with a 1/10 oz American Gold Eagle coin sitting on top of them.  The 14K gold staples themselves cost € 48.76, which converts to $53.06 for those of you in the US who aren’t shopping with Euros.  Now when you add on the shipping to get these gold staples from the Netherlands over here to the US, you can add another € 25.00 or $27.20 in US dollars for a grand total of € 73.76 or $80.31 US Dollars.  So the reason for that 1/10 of an ounce American Gold Eagle on top, thats an actual solid gold coin that is 99.999% gold (not simply gold plated metal) that will cost you just over $100 if you wanted to buy one.  So think about that for a minute.  Would you rather spend about $100 on some staples that have been coated in gold, or about $100 on a solid hunk of gold?  Not trying to take the fun out of this review, but just want to be clear what you are looking at so nobody gets the idea that these staples are worth anything other than the “novelty” value.  To put it in better perspective, these will run you about $3.35 per staple when you can simply turn around and get a box of 5000 standard Swingline staples (via Amazon) for almost exactly the same price.  SO anyway, now that we have that out of the way…lets just look at these from the ridiculous and fun perspective that I intended to.

One of my first thoughts about the gold plated staples was how much they would weigh and just in general what gold staples vs. regular staples would be like from a physical perspective.  Knowing that gold is a pretty soft metal, I was assuming that a solid gold staple probably wouldn’t work that well because it would probably bend too easily before you could get it to puncture multiple sheets of paper.  The weight issue came to mind too because obviously solid gold staples would be pretty heavy, but what about just gold plated staples, how much heavier would they be?  Well as you can see above I’ve got 25 (again, although the box said 24, my box had 25 so I’m staying consistent) standard staples on a scale and they weigh in at 0.82 grams.

Here are our shiny new 14K gold plated staples weighing in at 1.12 grams, which is significantly heavier when you think about it.  The 0.3 gram difference is actually a difference of about 37% so although 0.3 grams is pretty insignificant, its definitely a big difference.  I was surprised by this, but also noticed something else a little curious about these so another comparison was in order.

Although these are both rows of 25 staples, you can obviously see that the 14k gold plated staples are much wider than their standard counterparts since both rows are quite different lengths.  Technically speaking staples are kind of like wire, so the thickness is denoted by the term “gauge” and it appears that the standard staples have a higher gauge meaning that they are thinner than the gold plated ones.  At the end of the day, regardless of the gauge difference, these still have the same length legs and the same width crowns as standard staples so they will definitely work with any stapler that you have that takes standard staples as the ones I linked to above for the price comparison.

In the past I’ve reviewed colored staples that didn’t retain their color that well.  Once I flipped these over to see the underside was not coated with gold too, I was a) disappointed in the lack of more gold and b) worried that these might suffer the same fate of having gold flakes start to peel off.

After a full inspection and lengthy photo sessions of my gold plated staples, I finally decided to pull the trigger and use these suckers.  I have to say I’ve never felt so nervous about using a staple before, something about the excessive nature of these makes them a little hard to use, unless maybe you are literally rolling in money and you don’t care.  Initial results were good, the staple sliced through the paper and looked like it was holding fairly well.  You can’t tell just from looking at the photo above, but there are six sheets of standard copy paper there.  Mostly I was just happy and impressed that I didn’t see the same type of flaking that I saw with some of the colored staples I’ve tested in the past.

The next picture above shows the backside of the gold plated staples (background) as compared to the standard staple (foreground) and how they are folded in once they puncture the paper.  In my two tests, the gold plated staples seemed to not lay as flat once deployed.  Each leg of the gold plated staple when deployed seemed like it stuck up higher which I can only assume means that the metal used in them is slightly harder than standard staples, or the gold plating process somehow hardens them a bit.

Here is one more picture that gives a pretty good perspective on how the gold plated staples (left) don’t lay as flat, you can also see how much wider the legs are in this picture as compared to the standard staple to the right.

Don’t forget that if you are going to buy yourself some of these Gold Plated Staples (via OOOMs) its going to be hard to show them off.  Above you can see that in my favorite PaperPro EVO (via Amazon) stapler they do peek out behind that tiny window, but other than that or relying on someone to notice one small sliver of gold when you hand them your stapled paper, nobody will know that you were dumb enough to spend $80 on 24 staples….like this dummy did.

©2017, Brian Greene. All rights reserved.