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Our own 16 carat rose gold.

December 4, 2018
Home / The Vault / Our own 16 carat rose gold.

Here is a brief article on our very own and very beautiful 16 carat rose gold.

The story of how we came about 16 carat gold actually goes back to a lovely young couple who purchased an antique snake ring from us that was made in Birmingham in the late 1800's in what was hallmarked as 15 carat gold.

Antique Diamond Snake ES7475 2 1

They wanted a wedding band made for him in a similar style, so we decided to hand make a wedding band that followed the same design of wrapping around the finger, but without the snakes head or tail. Hand making a ring is not hard. What is hard is getting the exact colour of gold as the one already made. All gold is alloyed with other metals such as copper and silver to alter its colour and to give it more strength. A bit more copper will make it more rose in colour, a bit less retains its natural yellow. This is the reason why you can have 3 bracelets all made in 9 carat rose gold, but all with a slightly different tone to them.

Just like anyone who has gone to the hardware store to buy white paint and found there are so many different tones of white, this also applies to the colour of gold. To make sure our gold would match the antique ring, we had the ring analysed with an XRF tester. An XRF tester (X-ray fluorescence) is a non-destructive technique used to determine the elemental composition of materials. The XRF can determine the chemistry of a sample by measuring the fluorescent X-rays emitted from a sample when it is excited by a primary X-ray source. This is a brilliant way to determine what  material, in our case a ring, is exactly made from. Not only will it tell you the carat of gold, but it will also tell you what other alloys are in the piece as well as the percentage allowing you to get its exact "recipe" to allow gold in not only the same carat of gold, but the exact same colour.

Gold Being Melted

What we found out with the snake ring was that it was actually a slightly higher carat of gold at 16 carat and once we alloyed the gold and made the ring, as it was of course brand new and all polished, it had the most wonderful very soft rose gold tone to it.

Realising how lovely this colour is, we have kept the recipe to make some of our very special signature pieces to make them even more special and unique.

This are two examples of rings that we have made with our 16 carat gold.

Blck Opal Ring NS439 2 1Diamond Ring ES8323 2 1

Contact us

Shop 23, Level 2, Queen Victoria Building, George Street, Sydney 
NSW, Australia.

OPening hours

Monday
09:30am - 06:00pm
Tuesday
09:30am - 06:00pm
Wednesday
09:30am - 06:00pm
Thursday
09:30am - 06:00pm
Friday
09:30am - 06:00pm
Saturday
09:30am - 06:00pm
Sunday
09:30am - 05:00pm
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