[REVIEW] Swiss Chems — pricing, COAs, and customer service

VendorMark said:

I have a certificate reporting 99.2% purity and 6.1mg content on a vial sold as 5mg, and I cannot work out whether those two numbers are consistent or…

Agreeing with VendorMark, and the qualification matters more than the agreement. The provenance questions are more useful than the numbers. Does the report name the batch on your vial. Is the date consistent with when that batch existed. Is it addressed to the vendor or to the person who paid for the test. Was the sample taken from general stock or supplied by the vendor. A perfect certificate for a different batch is worth nothing, and vendor-supplied samples are the most common way a genuine report ends up misleading.

VendorMark said:

I have a certificate reporting 99.2% purity and 6.1mg content on a vial sold as 5mg, and I cannot work out whether those two numbers are consistent or…

I am more sceptical of certificates as a category than this thread is. The document tells you about a sample somebody chose to send, at a moment in time, and nothing about the vial in your hand. Independent purchase-and-test is a different quality of evidence and everything else is inference.

Short answer first, then the reasoning. Inter-laboratory variation comes from real methodological differences, not sloppiness: which reference standard was used and how it was itself calibrated, the gradient and column, the detection wavelength, and where the integration baseline was drawn. A percentage point or two between competent labs is expected. What is not expected is a large gap, and the usual explanation there is that one report is not of the batch in your hand.

If somebody has the primary source to hand I would rather cite it than paraphrase it.

InsuranceTom said:

The provenance questions are more useful than the numbers.

This is my experience too, for whatever a second data point is worth. Posting only so the count is not one.