When gold is prepared for jewelry, an alloy containing pure gold is created in a foundry with the addition of different percentages of additional metals, which harden and strengthen the material
These gold alloys are called karat. Every piece of jewelry that is produced is stamped with a carat die mark that indicates the percentage of pure gold in the piece of jewelry. We wrote about this topic at length here
The color of the jewelry comes from the additional metals that are added to the alloy - silver, copper, nickel and palladium are the influencing metals and turn the gold into white gold, pink gold, and yellow gold
How gold turns white and pink
To create white gold, mainly white metals such as silver, nickel and palladium are added to the metal
To create rose gold, copper is mainly added, which is a redder metal
Add half copper and half metal to yellow gold
The beauty is that each foundry has its own recipe for the ratio between the metals and sometimes foundries keep their recipes secret
The amount of pure gold also affects the color of the jewelry. The pure gold is a material with intense sparkle, and color depth. Therefore, the more carats there are in the jewelry (18, 22 carats), the warmer and more golden the color of the metal will be.
The color gold in a cultural context
Each country / region has acceptable carat percentages from which the color that people have become accustomed to seeing as gold and consider it to be high quality comes from
In Israel, for example, 14 carat gold is the most common and a 22 carat piece of jewelry may seem cheap at first glance, since we are used to seeing the color of 14 carat as high quality gold and an expensive material. There are countries where 9 carat is common, there are 18 carat and 22 carat
A piece of jewelry is made up of many features that absorb a lot of cultural significance
In conclusion, the differences between the amount of carat and the color of the gold greatly affect how the jewelry will look in the end. But the most important thing is that what you see is something you like! which is the thing that should lead you during renewal with a new piece of jewelry
