Types of gold by color in jewelry

Jewelry is not made of pure gold: this metal is too soft and is not suitable for everyday wear in its pure form. 

To achieve the desired characteristics of the metal, other metals are added to gold. Because of this, gold changes properties, color and sometimes value.

Yellow gold (red or classic)

The classic and most familiar color shade of gold is yellow. It is the same color of pure gold. However, in the jewelry industry, silver and copper are added to pure gold to achieve its strength characteristics. If more silver is added to the alloy, the lighter the final metal will be. If you increase the percentage of silver in the alloy even more, you can get a lemon shade of gold. To get a warmer shade, more copper is added.

The amount of such additions determines the final grade. The grade is the percentage of pure gold in the alloy, for example 585 grade means 58.5% pure gold in the alloy. Yellow gold of 585 grade has 28% silver and 13.5% copper.

The lowest grade is 375 proof. Products of this grade have a bright yellow color and the quality characteristics are inferior to 585 grade.

White Gold

White gold is a very expensive variant of the color of gold, has a steely cold shade. Due to its excellent combination with gemstones and especially diamonds, white gold is quite popular.

There are various techniques for creating white gold, but when creating a white gold alloy, any other gold such as 585 grade yellow gold must be pre-cleaned of all other impurities. Because of this, the consumption of the original material for making in white gold increases significantly. Then palladium, nickel, silver or platinum are added to the pure gold.

White gold created on the basis of platinum is considered the most valuable. Such an alloy is stronger than others, it is resistant to deformations and scratches. The least valuable is the alloy with nickel, which gives a slight yellowish tint and in some cases can cause allergic reactions.

Lemon Gold

Lemon gold is a special alloy that has a bright shade of lemon. As with other gold shades, its color is affected by the ratios of metals (silver and copper) used with gold.

The jewelers in our workshop have developed their own alloy that has excellent color and quality characteristics of lemon gold. However, any color modification of gold will require high production costs, respectively, and the cost of production will increase.

Rose Gold

Rose gold, just like white gold, needs to be made from pure gold because in rose gold the ratio of copper to silver needs to be calibrated from scratch. More copper is added to get a redder shade, and more silver is added to get a pinker shade. Rose gold, like white gold, blends very well with gemstones, especially making them stand out and accentuate them in jewelry.

Green Gold

Many people are not even aware of the existence of rare green gold. It is much less popular than red, rose and white gold, largely because green gold jewelry is fragile and almost impossible to wear.

Green gold is usually used as inserts in other color shades, more often in combination with white gold.

Green gold can be obtained by several consecutive operations: purify the alloy from impurities; add more silver than copper to the alloy; cadmium and zinc are then added to the resulting alloy in a certain ratio and gold with a greenish tint is obtained.

There are other color variations of gold such as blue, blue, purple, brown and even black gold. However, like green gold, they have not become popular. In addition, the complexity of manufacturing such color variants affects the final cost of the product, increasing it up to several times due to the addition of various rare metals. Therefore, jewelers focused on working with lemon, white, red and rose gold.