Jewellery technology

Pure (24 carat) gold is a deep yellow colour (an orange shade of yellow) and is soft and very malleable. The coloured carat gold alloys range in gold content from 8 to 22 carats (33.3% - 91.6% gold) and can be obtained in a range of colour shades: green (actually a green shade of yellow), pale yellow, yellow, deep yellow, pink/rose and red. There are also white golds and even unusual coloured golds such as 'purple gold'. They all have different mechanical properties such as strength, hardness and malleability (ductility) and some alloys can be heat treated to maximise strength and hardness. There are gold alloys that are optimised for different manufacturing routes such as lost wax (investment) casting and stamping.

How can colour be varied and why do different gold alloys (an alloy is a mixture of two or more pure metals) have different mechanical and other properties? To answer these questions in depth requires a good technical knowledge of metallurgy. However, it is possible to give some simplified answers.

The Coloured Carat Golds

Almost all conventional, coloured carat golds are based on gold-silver-copper alloys, often with minor alloying additions. All three metals have the same crystal structure (face centred cubic, FCC) and so are compatible with each other over a large range of compositions. Typical minor additions include deoxidisers such as zinc and silicon, grain refiners such as iridium and cobalt and possibly metals such as nickel to strengthen the alloy. Larger zinc additions (about 1-2%) can improve melt fluidity and hence 'castability' in lost wax casting, as can silicon, resulting in better filling of the mould and better reproduction of surface detail. Even larger zinc additions (up to 10%) can improve malleability of certain carat golds, particularly 14 carat and lower, used for making jewellery by stamping from sheet. Additions of low melting point metals such as zinc, tin, cadmium and indium lower melting ranges and hence are used to make carat gold solders.

Colour

Gold is yellow and copper is red, the only two coloured pure metals. All other metals are white or grey in colour. The addition of a red colour to yellow, as every school child knows, makes the yellow pinker and eventually red. The addition of a white makes the yellow colour paler and eventually white. This principle of mixing colours is the same in carat golds. Adding copper to gold makes it redder and adding silver, zinc and any other metal makes gold paler. Thus, we can understand that lower carat golds, because we can add more alloying metals, can have a wider range of colours than the higher carat golds.
Thus at 22 carat (91.6% gold), we can only add a maximum of 8.4% of alloying metals and hence can only obtain yellow to pink/rose shades. At 18 carat (75.0% gold) and lower, we can add 25% or more alloying metals and hence get colours ranging from green through yellow to red, depending on the copper: silver plus zinc ratio. Thus at any given caratage we can vary the colour by varying the copper: silver plus zinc ratio.