When gold is made into jewelry, an alloy containing pure gold is created in a foundry with the addition of various percentages of additional metals, which harden and strengthen the material.

These gold alloys are called karats. Every piece of jewelry that is produced is stamped with a karat stamp that indicates the percentage of pure gold in the piece of jewelry. We have written at length about this topic here.

The color of the jewelry comes from the additional metals that are added to the alloy - silver, copper, nickel, and palladium are the metals that influence and ultimately turn the gold into white gold, rose gold, and yellow gold.

How gold turns white and pink

To produce white gold, mainly white metals such as silver, nickel and palladium are added to the metal.

To create pink gold, copper, which is a redder metal, is mainly added.

Half copper and half metal are added to yellow gold

The beauty is that each foundry has its own recipe for the ratio of metals and sometimes foundries keep their recipes secret.

The amount of pure gold also affects the color of the jewelry. Pure gold is a material with a strong sparkle and depth of color. Therefore, the more karats there are in the jewelry (18, 22 karats), the warmer and more golden the shade of the metal will be.

The color gold in a cultural context

Each country/region has an accepted karat percentage from which the color that people are accustomed to seeing in gold and consider it to be of high quality derives.

In Israel, for example, 14-karat gold is the most common, and a 22-karat piece of jewelry may seem cheap at first glance, since we are used to seeing the color of 14-karat gold as high-quality and expensive material. There are countries where 9-karat is common, and there are 18-karat and 22-karat.

A piece of jewelry is made up of many characteristics that absorb a lot of cultural meaning.

In conclusion, the differences between the amount of karat and color and gold greatly affect how the jewelry will look in the end. But most importantly, what you see is something you love! That is what should guide you during the renewal of a new piece of jewelry.