18 carat gold: what standard it is, properties of the alloy, its cost, marking, application, advantages and disadvantages of the precious metal

Gold grade is a designation showing how much precious metal is contained in an ornament or piece of jewelry. Determination of the sample and branding is carried out by a specialized institution that exercises control over the metal. Many people are interested in what carats are, how they are determined, and what standard will correspond to, for example, 18k. Let's look at the question: 18 carat gold - what standard?

Most countries in the world determine the amount of gold contained in jewelry using karats. This measurement system has been used for a long time. A pure alloy, according to this system, is approximately equal to 24 carats.

But what if you are interested in the question of 18 carat gold, what is it? Nothing complicated. This is 750 standard, that is, there will be 75 percent pure noble metal in such jewelry.

There are several dozen samples in total in the world. But only two measurement systems are used: carat and metric. Jewelry of 375, 500,585,750,958 samples is produced on the territory of our country. During the Soviet years, the 583 sample was especially popular.

Election norm

There is a double situation in answering the question of what is the demand for gold products. The standard choice in European countries is 18 karat gold. The sample does not interest buyers too much. For consumers, especially women, it is enough to see that the jewelry has a rich yellow color and looks attractive. But in America, jewelry of 585 standard (aurum 14 carats) is in great demand. The USA is the only country where the sale of products with a carat value of less than 10 is prohibited, while in the rest of the world the sale of jewelry made from 8-9 carat gold is common.

What kind of gold is there in jewelry?

Yellow, white and red are the three main colors of gold jewelry. Pure gold is yellow in color. In jewelry, gold comes in yellow, white, and red (or pink) colors. When talking about metal in jewelry, they say “gold”, but in fact they mean an alloy. Its shade depends on the alloy - other metals that are added to pure gold to give it strength.

White gold is obtained when silver, zinc, palladium, nickel or platinum are added to the alloy. When the alloying component is copper, it will be red gold.

Some stores sell gold in unusual colors. These are the so-called non-ferrous metals - alloys of gold with metals that give it bright shades. Thus, an alloy of gold with indium gives a blue color, and with aluminum - violet.

How to determine carat content

To determine the marking of a product with absolute certainty, you should look for the designation “750” or “18K” on the back of the jewelry.

If an item has a carat value, it means it also has a manufacturer's mark. The last indicator indicates that the marking is accurate.

It is also necessary to look at the country that manufactured the product. The sample does not indicate the authenticity of the product; it must have a mark with the original trademark of the manufacturer. Only this guarantees that the item is not a fake.

Is it possible to test gold at home?

There are many popular methods for verifying the authenticity of gold, but I will explain why you should not trust them. Here are the most common ones.

Iodine. Drop iodine onto the product and see what happens. Real gold will not tarnish. But brass and copper also do not darken.

Vinegar. They say that if a fake is placed in vinegar for a while and heated, the solution will change color from transparent to blue. A copper product can indeed give such a reaction, but what is needed is not table vinegar, but acetic acid. In this case, the reaction will occur even if the jewelry is made of gold, but the alloy contains a lot of copper.

Magnet. This method will help if, for example, gilded iron is passed off as gold. Then the product will be attracted by a magnet. It is impossible to distinguish gold from silver in this way: both metals are not magnetic.

Lapis pencil. Lapis pencil is an antiseptic based on silver nitrate. If you run it over a piece of gold or silver lightly soaked in water, nothing will happen. Other metals will leave a black mark. But, if the product is plated with gold, lapis will also not give any reaction. Therefore, it will not be possible to distinguish jewelry made of gilded metal from gold.

Sun and shadow. It is believed that real gold shines equally in the sun and in the shade. However, there is no objective scale of this brilliance: one person thinks it is the same, another will see differences. And the shine of used jewelry in any case will not be as bright as that of a new one.

On a tooth. If you bite into gold alloy, it will leave teeth marks. Such a check can easily ruin both jewelry and teeth. And there will also be traces on the lead.

Price

18 carat gold has been found, now it remains to decide how much the product will cost. The final cost includes not only the carat value, but also the weight of the item, the complexity of its manufacture and the design performed. The main mistake of many buyers is that when determining the price, they focus on how many grams of gold are in the item. This is not the main indicator. The work done greatly influences the final cost.

Each manufacturer has its own methods to make the product more flexible and durable. Of course, the price greatly depends on the quality.

Inset gemstones, special clasps and small details also affect the cost.

Most gold items are made automatically. But sometimes a piece of jewelry needs expert manual processing or engraving. The cost of such an item is rising. The market price of one gram of 18-karat gold ranges from 4800-5000 rubles.

Metric system

This system shows the percentage of pure gold in jewelry. For example, the 585th alloy has 58.5 percent precious metal and 41 and a half percent additives of other metals.

Products made from pure gold, due to the natural softness of the metal, are not durable and will last a short time. Therefore, jewelers have to add impurities to the alloy to make the jewelry more durable.

The ligature in yellow metal products may contain mixtures of copper, nickel, silver, or palladium. Due to ligature additives, products come in different shades: white, yellow, pink and even black. In the post-Soviet space, the most common sample is 585. Nowadays 18 carat gold (750 standard) is becoming increasingly popular, despite the fact that its price is high. The 583 standard, known in the USSR, is actually no different from the 585, but is now practically not used, since in 1995 it was replaced with a higher quality one. A significant disadvantage of this test is its unpopularity in Europe.

Existing gold samples in Russia and the type of their mark.

Most often, jewelers use 585 standard to make jewelry. 18 carat gold, or 750 in our opinion, is suitable for creating not just jewelry, but, one might say, works of jewelry art. In this case, it is no longer the percentage of pure precious metal that is valuable, but the work of the jeweler and the complexity of the product.

18 karat gold, which is produced abroad, is different from our products, which have 750 written on the hallmark.

The alloy ligature used in the manufacture of jewelry in many European countries contains a larger amount of silver, while ours contains more copper. Therefore, European gold has a yellow color, which, according to many, is a more noble color. And domestic metal is redder. Moreover, the product produced by us is more durable.

In the countries of the Vienna Convention (Germany, Austria) and the countries of the former USSR, the metric system described above is adopted. Some European countries and America use the karate system. All samples have their equivalent in carats.

Caring for your decoration

Although the alloy is considered the strongest metal, it requires special care. Items must be stored in a dry place. If the owner of the product encounters chemicals at work, it is better not to wear gold jewelry. To ensure that the item is scratch-free, it must be stored in a special soft box. You should periodically check the condition of the jewelry and the integrity of its clasps. If there is the slightest malfunction, you need to take the gold item to a jeweler for inspection.

As a result, 750 alloys are what most buyers settle on. This product is affordable, beautiful and will last a long time.

Difference between 14 and 18 carats

18K is considered an elite grade. 14K (585 standard) is worn mainly as an everyday option, saving the expensive 750 standard for special occasions.

Cleanliness, hardness and durability

The more alloys in the alloy, the more pronounced the properties of the alloying components. 585 sample, consisting of almost half of impurities, is much lighter, harder and stronger than 750 sample, and is less susceptible to minor damage such as scratches or dents.

Color

The color of pure gold is bright yellow. An alloy containing a lot of copper takes on a reddish tint (pure copper has a rich brick-pink color). Green gold is coming into fashion, which contains no copper at all, but a lot of silver.

Many jewelers use the rhodium plating technique in their work - coating products with a thin (1.5–25 microns) layer of rhodium (a rare platinum group metal, many times harder than gold). Rhodium-plated jewelry can be not only the classic yellow, pink and white colors, but also black.

Markings

¾ gold items are marked o (units of measurement are indicated after the numbers). In Europe, such a ring will most likely have two marks at once: carat and metric (750).

Price

In Arab countries, you can find jewelry positioned by sellers as almost pure gold, but the reliability of these assurances is questionable.

Expert opinion

Vsevolod Kozlovsky

6 years in jewelry making. Knows everything about samples and can identify a fake in 12 seconds

Therefore, 750 is the highest of jewelry standards, given that 958 turned out to be unsuccessful in terms of price and quality. It is also the most expensive: in Russian stores such jewelry costs on average 1.13 times more than standard 14-karat jewelry. If you go to pawn shops and try to sell such metal as scrap, it will be valued at 1.25 times higher than 14-karat.

What is carat

The karat system involves designating the percentage of gold in the alloy with numbers from 9 to 24, where 24 is the highest standard, that is, 100%. Physically, the absolute purity of the metal is unattainable and impurities are present in trace amounts, therefore the “thousandth” sample is designated by the number 999 - 99.9%.

I’ll answer the main question right away: in Russia, jewelry with a hallmark of 18K is indicated by the 750 mark. They contain 75% pure gold.

Origin of the word

The breadfruit tree of John, known to people since biblical times, grows in the Mediterranean - Ceratonia capita. Its fruits are consumed as a delicacy, added to immunostimulating complexes, and compote is made from them. But ceratonia also has a property that is non-standard for plants: it gives birth to seeds, the mass of which is constant and equal to

0.19 g. Our ancient ancestors noticed this and began to use a weight measure that refers to the seed of ceratonia (Greek cerátiοn) - carat.

The modern carat (measure of weight) has not changed since then and is 0.2 g.

How to determine carat content

You won’t be able to measure the gold content in jewelry if the sample has worn off and is hard to see at home. The maximum that will be possible is to distinguish a gold alloy from an obvious fake. But if the ring has another standard - metric or spool (it is found on jewelry and luxury items produced before the revolution or immediately after), then you can convert its value into the carat system.

How to convert to the metric system and sample correspondence table

There are two ways to convert carats to thousandths of mass.

Legislative regulation

In Russia, all precious metal products with a purity of at least 300 are subject to hallmarking and hallmarking (actually 375, because we do not produce lower-grade gold). The metric value of the sample is applied to the jewelry; it is up to the buyer to convert it into carats.

Gold samples according to GOST in Russia. Controlling body for assaying and hallmarking

The amount of precious metal in gold alloys is controlled by the state. Marking is carried out by the Assay Office. The following samples have been established on the territory of Russia: Z75, 500, 585, 750, 875, 916, 958, 999. Sometimes the 583 marking is found - this is the mark of the times of the Soviet Union.

In our country, all jewelry containing at least 30% pure gold is subject to assaying and hallmarking.

The structure of the mark is as follows: first, the code of the State Assay Supervision Inspectorate is put, then there is the sign of the assay certificate, and to the right of it is the digital designation of the sample.

The code indicates the region where the product was branded upon inspection. The mark of the Russian Assay Certificate looks like an imprint of the head of a woman wearing a kokoshnik.

All information about the gold product will be written inside a figure resembling a spatula.

Gold samples in Russia

How to check gold in a pawnshop

Most often, in a pawnshop, gold is checked using chemical reagents. This is how a 585 sample product is tested. A notch about a millimeter deep is made on the decoration. A notch is needed to immediately eliminate cases where gilding or other yellow coating is applied. In place of the cut, under a layer of yellow gold, you can see metal of a different color.

Then the reagent for the 585th sample is applied to the cut site. It will not leave traces if the sample matches the declared one. If it's fake, it will leave a black mark. This mark is called a burn. If you drop a reagent intended for 750-karat gold onto 585-karat gold, a brown trace will remain.

It is impossible to detect counterfeits made of steel (for example, when white steel is passed off as white gold): they will not react to any reagent, and no trace will appear. For this reason, many pawnshops generally do not accept items made of metal similar to white gold for inspection, especially 750-carat: the reaction of the chemical is very poorly visible on it, often it is not visible at all.

Another way to check in pawn shops is with a spectrometer. This is a device whose operation is based on x-ray radiation. In a few minutes, the spectrometer determines not only the authenticity of gold, but also its fineness.

Spectrometers are expensive, and not all pawn shops have them. But the lambshop employees, even if they have this device, still prefer the method with reagents. It is considered more reliable because the spectrometer can identify a gold plated item as gold.

Care and rules for handling high-karat gold

Compliance with the following rules will preserve the presentable appearance of the decoration and help avoid the appearance of various defects:

• You should remove jewelry before cleaning, cooking, any water procedures, or visiting the gym;
• Solar precious metal should be stored separately from other jewelry, the storage location should be dry. Boxes upholstered in soft fabric or jewelry bags are ideal;
• Products should be maintained regularly. This can be done at home, but the best solution would be to regularly visit a jewelry workshop;