Metals & Plating

Gold

Gold is infinitely flexible in jewellery design, as it is typically alloyed. The reason gold is alloyed is to improve the wearability or the colour of the metal. There are several different types:

  • Pure Gold is very soft by itself. It comes in 9kt, 10kt, 14kt, 18kt, 19kt and 22kt (37.5% – 41.7% – 58.4% – 75% – 79.2% – 91.6% gold).
  • Pink or Rose Gold is pure gold and copper.
  • Yellow Gold is made by mixing gold with an amount of silver and copper.
  • White Gold is made by combining pure gold (which is a deep yellow) with other white metals that bleach it out to a whiter colour (Nickel and palladium for example). Most designers today plate their white gold jewellery with rhodium, which has a pure white colour so that it will appear bright white, however this plating will wear off after a while depending on how much wear and tear the piece gets.

At Gemstone Direct, all the white gold items I custom make use super white gold and is plating free, so it will be white forever.

Platinum

Typically the purest of metals use 90 to 95% pure platinum. The other metal that is used to alloy is typically iridium; the reason this is to make the ring easier to work with and polish.

Platinum is much stronger than gold. It has unique qualities one of which it is one of the densest metals, another is the melting point which is almost double that of gold. Because it is such a dense metal, it basically acts almost gummy, and the metal won’t separate as it gets moved around which makes it very resistant to breakage. While gold is also a dense metal it is more prone to flaking or breaking.

For example: if you take a gold ring and rub it against an iron pipe- you will see a little gold on the pipe ; if you rub a platinum ring on the same iron pipe you will see iron on the platinum ring.

Pros and Cons:

  • Platinum jewellery is more expensive because it’s heavier than gold (around 80%) and you always pay by weight
  • Platinum has a different white colour – it’s almost a greyish white. Some people love it others do not
  • Platinum never needs to be plated
  • No one has allergies to platinum, where on rare occasion some people react to white gold, pink gold or lower karat/lower quality yellow (because of the nickel or copper present in the alloy)
  • Because of the durability platinum is considered the best metal for jewellery

Old Gold

We also take in old gold. If you have some old rings that are out of style, or old broken jewellery that you can’t use anymore, you can have them melted down and use that money to get a new item. You could also have any of your old diamonds or gemstones set into the a new piece of your choosing.

Typically we do not recast old gold, as too many issues can arise from this (recasting makes the new item more brittle, the alloys can mix badly causing porosity in the item to have more holes that swiss cheese, etc.) The best thing to do is get credit for the old gold or if it is really sentimental we can have the gold smelted and purified and then remade into something new (this however has an added cost).

If you’re interested to learn more, call us or email and we can go over the endless options.

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