The Basics of Different Gold Color Hues

We both buy and sell gold jewelry at AAA Jewelers, and we’re experienced with the various added colorations you’ll see in popular gold products – yellow gold, white gold and rose gold chief among them.

What do these colors mean within gold, and how do they affect values and the types of custom jewelry materials that are typically made using different colorations? Here are the basics.

Why Add Color?

In its purest form, gold is a very distinct yellow color – but unfortunately, it’s also too soft to be used in jewelry. For this reason, gold is almost always combined with other metals to create combinations, called alloys. Depending on which materials are added to this, the color of the gold can change. The most popular colors are yellow, white and rose, which we’ll discuss momentarily, but gold can also be bronze, red, platinum, lime, palladium and others.

Where possible, many people look to match gold with the quality of a diamond, when the two are being combined. White gold with a yellow diamond will highlight the imperfections of the gold, where using yellow gold would not.

Yellow Gold

Yellow gold is generally created when metals like silver, copper and zinc are combined with gold. It most closely resembles pure gold, but this also means that it’s softer than other alloys and can scratch a bit more easily, so it requires more care. Polishing yellow gold is good now and then, but too often will cause it to lose too much metal.

White Gold

In most cases, white gold is a combination of gold and nickel, palladium or silver. It has some of the widest variance for how its products can end up – nickel makes for harder products perfect for rings and brooch pins, where softer metals like palladium make it perfect for soft gemstone settings.

Rose Gold

Rose gold is a standard mix of pure gold and copper, and it’s also referred to as pink or red gold in some cases. It used to be known as “Russian” gold, and was most popular in the 19^th century – thought it’s undergoing a resurgence in recent years. The higher the copper content in this gold, the stronger the red coloration.

Want to learn more about gold colors, or any of our custom jewelry solutions? The experts at AAA Jewelers are standing by to assist you.