It's pure gold or is it?

Gold information its purity and its impurities

Many of my clients want to know more about gold and the different values and colours of it. I only work in 18ct gold and I don't rhodium plate my white gold and here's why.
Pure gold which is classed as 24carat is bright yellow and very soft. In the Western world it is very rarely used for jewellery. To achieve a better colour and a tougher/harder texture we mix 24ct gold with other metals (alloys) to make a harder alloy of differing colours and carats. The metals most often used are copper, silver bronze and palladium.

An alloy of gold with copper and bronze gives us the traditional yellow shade, gold and copper creates red gold and mixing gold with silver and palladium gives white gold.

Hallmarking of the gold
Hallmarking is Europe's earliest form of consumer protection. A hallmark is a guarantee of certain purity or fineness of the metal, these are determined by metal testing In the UK this is undertaken by the assay offices. When something is made out of gold it is sent to one of the assay offices who test the gold to give it a hallmark to show its purity.

Hallmarks
.999 = 24 carat = 99.9%   gold content
.916 = 22 carat = 91.6%   gold content
.750 = 18 carat = 75%      gold content
.585 = 14 carat = 58.5%   gold content
.375 =   9 carat = 37.5%   gold content

For years 9ct gold has been a popular metal in the UK but this is changing, as shown in the chart there is more copper, bronze or silver in 9ct gold jewellery than there is gold. The gold of choice in this country is moving towards 18ct gold, it is a sufficiently hard alloy to use for jewellery.  18ct yellow gold is a warm colour without being brash, the white gold has a light grey colour that sets it aside from silver or platinum. Again in the UK many people want their white gold to be very white, it's less yellow than it used to be thanks to the introduction of palladium as an alloy, but as many high street stores rhodium plate their white gold to make it whiter, customers are not used to seeing the true colour of white gold, which is a beautiful subtle shade and I believe it's a travesty to plate it to make it look like something it isn't.

Over the past couple of years the price of gold has almost tripled, a friend of mine who bought my first serious piece of jewellery 5 years ago at £560.00 would now be paying £1,900 and as gold becomes increasingly scarce it is forecast to keep on going up in both price and value.