The Quick and Easy Way to Understanding What 14kt Gold Is

None of the jewelry you are wearing is 100% pure gold, (unless it’s 24kt) but that’s very few and far between. Why is this? The main reason is that 24kt gold is too soft to be worn every day, aside from that by alloying gold to lower karats, it makes it more affordable. Affordable you say...gold is at over $1800/ounce right now! Many people wonder, “why is gold so expensive?” aside from the costs that it takes to get the gold out of the Earth and then alloy it to be usable in jewelry, then create a mounting for it, gold is RARE!

A fun little fact out of all the precious metals (gold, platinum, and silver) gold is the rarest! If you were to take the Earth and cut it into a BILLION pieces, gold only takes up 4 of those pieces, platinum takes up about 5 of those pieces.

Let’s get back to what the karat stamp on a piece of gold means. A metals' fineness is based upon the karat system, which is based upon parts out of 24. This means that 24kt gold is pure gold, all 24 parts are gold. We then go to 18kt, which is 75% pure gold (18 parts out of 24 are pure gold), 14kt is 58.5% pure gold (14 parts out of 24 are pure gold), and 10kt which is 41.7% pure gold (10 parts out of 24 are pure gold).

Now you know what each karat means, what makes up the other part of the item? The other parts are called alloys, which are other metals added to the mix in order to make gold more wearable, malleable, lowers melting points, etc.

Very common alloys are:

14kt yellow: gold, copper, silver, zinc

18kt yellow: gold, copper, silver, zinc

Green gold: gold, copper, silver (the silver amount is increased)

Rose gold: gold, copper, silver (here the amount of silver is decreased)

White gold: gold, nickel or palladium, copper, zinc

Now you know the very basics of what 24kt, 18kt, 14kt, and 10kt gold is!

FUN FACT!

Gold bars on average weigh around 27.5 pounds!!