In this article we will focus on the most popular precious metals used for jewelry: gold,
platinum and the fast growing in popularity palladium.
Pure gold and platinum are soft metals which are extremely dense. pure gold is about two and half times heavier than iron and pure platinum is just under three times. While really bright in color pure metals are not suitable for fine jewelry because of their softness. Soft metals are easy to damage, difficult to polish, and unsuitable for detailed work. This is why they are mixed (alloyed) with other metals, in order to give them the desired properties. This is also where all this “carats” and confusing numbers come into play. In fact it is pretty simple:
All pure metals in nature are white or gray in color except two, gold – bright yellow and copper- reddish pink. Now we go back to precious metals
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Carat is a confusing name for purity or fineness of precious metals. It is confusing because the same word is used as a weight measurement for precious stones. That carat is equal to 0.2gr. and have nothing to do with metal fineness. To differentiate the one carat from the other, in some standards, weight carat is marked with ct and purity karat with kt or k. We can accept this rule to avoid confusion in further articles, therefore when we address metal purity we will use “karat”. Karat is used mainly to define purity of gold alloys. Different countries have different standards for gold purity and the most used globally alloys are: 9kt or 375, 10kt or 416, 14kt or 585, 18kt or 750, 21kt or 875 and 22 or 916. The alternative number which alone can be used as hallmark indicates the number of fine gold parts in the alloy out of 1000. The easy way to translate this into a manageable information is to perceive it as the percentage of fine gold used x10. For example 750 means 75% pure gold content or 18kt.Platinum is used in almost pure form and 95% hallmarked 950 is a standard alloy. All alloys with pure platinum content of 95.0% or higher can be also marked with the full word “platinum” or “”plat.” Other used alloys are 900 (90%), 800 (80%) and 585(58.5) also called karat platinum. The amazing qualities of this metal are better described in another article where I am comparing it with the white gold alternative.Palladium 950 alloys are as white as the platinum, blending well with white diamonds and eliminating the need of rh