By Liz SterlingA ring is mostly metal. The diamond is what you look at, but the metal is what you feel every hour: its weight, its warmth, the way it has worn smooth where your thumb finds it.
Choosing it well takes a few plain facts. Here they are.
Gold, and what the karat means
Pure gold is 24 karat, and it is too soft to wear. So gold is mixed with other metals to make it strong, and the karat tells you how much of the piece is gold.
| Karat | Gold in it | What that means on the hand |
|---|---|---|
| 24k | All of it | Too soft for a ring |
| 18k | Three quarters | Richer in color, a little softer |
| 14k | A little over half | Harder wearing; the everyday choice |
| 10k | A little under half | Harder still, and the palest in color |
The surprise is that less gold wears harder. The metals mixed in are what give a ring its strength.
Those same metals give gold its color. Yellow gold is gold with copper and silver, the color gold has always been. Rose gold takes its blush from a larger share of copper. White gold is gold mixed with white metals, usually nickel or palladium. And there is a rarer green gold, made with silver, that carries a faint green cast and turns up in older pieces.
Why white gold wears a coat
White gold on its own is not quite white. It is a soft, warm white. The mirror-bright white you see in a case is rhodium, a metal of the platinum family, plated over the gold.
That coat wears. On a ring worn every day it lasts about one to two years, and then a little warmth shows through at the back of the band. Nothing is wrong with the ring. It goes back on the bench, is polished and plated, and comes home bright. That errand is rhodium plating.
Platinum
Platinum is white through and through. It is also dense: a platinum ring is noticeably heavier than the same ring in gold, and many people love it for exactly that.
It wears differently, too. When gold is scratched, a little metal is lost. When platinum is scratched, the metal moves aside and stays. Over the years the surface softens into a satin finish jewelers call patina, and it can be polished back to a mirror whenever you wish.
A piece marked 950 is 95 percent platinum. It is the usual choice for skin that reacts to other metals.
