What is White Gold

White gold alloys became fashionable mainly as a substitute for platinum. Platinum is quite expensive, needs greater temperatures than gold, and is generally considered harder to work with than gold, although it is ideal for use in diamond settings. Nowadays, they are a jewellery metal in their own right and currently very fashionable and desirable, particularly among the younger age groups. White golds are available up to 21 carat. They are often used to enhance diamonds and other gemstones. White gold bridal jewellery is increasingly popular.

Making gold white

Making gold white is similar to mixing colours in paints.Simply mixing a white and a yellow metal together does not just produce a pale yellow colour, alloying produces a difference in the atomic structure which alters the reflectivity of light of different wavelengths. Adding a red metal (copper) will tend to make gold red and adding a white metal tends to make gold paler and eventually white. Thus, all other alloying metals to gold, apart from copper, will tend to whiten the colour and so it is possible to make carat golds that are a reasonable white colour.

Whilst additions of any white metal to gold will tend to bleach it's colour, in practice, nickel and palladium (and platinum) are strong 'bleachers ' of gold, silver and zinc are moderate bleachers and all others are moderate to weak in effect.

This has given rise, historically, to 2 basic classes of white golds - the Nickel whites and the Palladium whites. The nickel-whites tend to have a colder white colour, whereas the palladium whites have a warmer colour. Good nickel whites tend to be hard and difficult to process. Good palladium whites tend to be soft, easy to process (but lost wax casting is more difficult) but are much more expensive, because of the price of palladium. Consequently, many commercial white alloys are thrifted in nickel or palladium and contain some copper; hence, colour is compromised. At the 8-10 carat (33.3 - 41.6% gold) level, gold-silver alloys are quite white, ductile although soft and are used for jewellery purposes.


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