I was wondering if you could help me out with the phrase "Authenticity guarantee". Is it proper English to use this?
Would "Authentic guarantee" or "Authenticity guaranteed" be more correct?
Answer
Either one can be used in certain circumstances.
"Authentic guarantee" is a noun phrase; it means a guarantee that is genuine or legitimate, as opposed to a fake guarantee. This is fairly unusual, since a guarantee is usually either trustworthy or not based on whose name is on it, and it's rare for someone to stamp a guarantee on in someone else's name. "Authenticity guarantee" is a slightly different noun phrase that means a promise or guarantee that something will be authentic. So a product might have an authenticity guarantee that gives conditions for some compensation if the product isn't authentic. This is much more plausible.
"Authenticity guaranteed" is a noun followed by a verb; it means that something has had a promise made that it will be authentic, and implies that the promise still holds. (It looks like past simple tense at first glance, but I suspect there's actually an ellipsis to leave out "has been", making it really present perfect. Alternatively, it's a noun followed by a verb's past participle, leaving out the connective "is", with the same meaning.)
So if you're referring to the promise itself, you'd use the first one; if you're just saying that a promise exists, you'd use the last. Because "authenticity guaranteed" is a more-or-less complete, if terse, sentence, it's considerably more common in advertising of various sorts.
(Similarly, you can say "I guarantee authenticity", which means that you promise it's authentic.)
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