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White gold is not white. It is gold, which is yellow, mixed with pale metals to lighten it and then plated with rhodium to finish the job. When a white gold ring starts looking warm or dull around the band, nothing has gone wrong. The plating has worn through and you are seeing the actual alloy underneath. What rhodium is and why it goes on top Rhodium is element 45, a very rare, hard, corrosion-resistant transition metal in the platinum group. It is 6.0 on the Mohs scale, melts at 1964 degrees C and has a density of 12.423 g/cm3....

A broken clasp is usually a cheap fix. A broken herringbone chain usually is not, and the difference has almost nothing to do with how the piece looks when you bring it in. What decides the answer at the bench is the chain's construction, whether solder can be placed without cooking a nearby stone, and whether the repair will leave the piece still honestly stamped for its karat. Here is how a jeweller works through those three questions. The Clasp Is Rarely the Problem When a necklace comes off during the day, most people assume the clasp failed. Usually the...

Chain thickness is the single number that decides whether a necklace survives being worn or comes back to the bench in two pieces. It gets quoted three different ways: millimetres, gauge, and grams. They measure different things, and only one of them tells you much about strength on its own. Gauge is a formula, not a list someone made up Wire gauge looks arbitrary until you see the equation behind it. The American wire gauge, which jewellery suppliers usually call Brown & Sharpe, defines diameter as d = 0.127 mm x 92^((36-n)/39). Every gauge number falls out of that one...

Antique, vintage and estate get used as though they were graded categories with fixed rules behind them. Two of the three are not defined anywhere in jewellery law. We downloaded the full text of the FTC Jewelry Guides, 16 CFR Part 23, the regulation that governs how jewellery may be described in the United States, and searched it: the words antique, vintage and estate appear zero times. There is no age threshold in it at all. Here is what the words actually mean, where the famous 100-year rule really comes from, and what to check before you buy. Estate Means...

The single most useful rule for travelling with jewellery is that checked baggage is not where valuables belong. TSA allows jewellery in both carry-on and checked bags but tells travellers to keep valuable items with them at all times and not put them in checked baggage, and the reason becomes obvious the moment you look at what an airline actually owes you if a bag disappears. That number is lower than most people assume, and it is the same whether the bag held socks or a wedding set. What an Airline Actually Owes You for a Lost Bag Under the...

The safest way to clean a gemstone is decided by more than how hard it is. Hardness tells you how easily a stone scratches, and the Mohs scale ranks that from talc at 1 to diamond at 10, a system the USGS traces back to the Austrian mineralogist F. Mohs in 1822. But hardness says nothing about whether a stone will survive an ultrasonic bath. Topaz sits at 8, harder than most stones in your box, and GIA still says to keep it out of steam and ultrasonic cleaners. This guide covers both halves: what scratches what, and what actually...