About Gold Jewelry

What is it about gold that has made it a favorite of jew­el­ers since antiq­uity?  And why is it so sought after still today?

Both ques­tions have a sim­ple answer: because gold is beau­ti­ful.  But there is more to the allure of gold than its appeal to the eye.  Gold is a rare ele­ment mak­ing it a sta­tus sym­bol to own.  In antiq­uity, only kings and rulers wore gold.  By Roman times, gold own­er­ship was more dis­trib­uted in the pop­u­la­tion, but as now, cost fac­tors nar­rowed own­er­ship to the wealthy.

From the jeweler’s point of view, gold is a joy to work with–it can be fused, sol­dered, formed, forged and shaped with rel­a­tively great ease com­pared with other met­als like sil­ver, and espe­cially cop­per.  Gold has the down­side of being rel­a­tively soft and eas­ily deformed when in its pure state.  By mix­ing gold with another metal, like cop­per or sil­ver, soft­ness can be con­trolled.  The mix­ture is an alloy.  For exam­ple, 14K gold is an alloy con­tain­ing 14 parts of pure gold mixed with 10 parts of another metal (or com­bi­na­tion of met­als.)  See my post about karats for more details.

22K Gold Ring with Red Spinel Cabochon

Another way to com­pen­sate for the soft­ness of gold lies in a spe­cial way of form­ing metal called “anti­clas­tic rais­ing” (see details here.)  With this tech­nique, metal is shaped so that the forces that cause metal to deform are in oppo­si­tion, result­ing in a form that is very strong and resis­tant to change even when there is not much thickness.

The ring shown here is made by this method.  Achiev­ing results like this requires patience and time because the edges of the cylin­der (the ring)  must be raised up con­trary to its axis of rota­tion.  Try this your­self:  make a cylin­der from a piece of paper by putting one edge against another.  Now try to raise the edges of the cylin­der up and over in the con­trary direc­tion.  With paper this is not pos­si­ble; metal will stretch to achieve the result although it requires great care and dili­gence, not to men­tion know-how.

See Ricco’s 22K Gold Jew­elry in his Etsy shop