Gold question

[packrat]

I''m lazy and haven''t looked to see if this has been posted before, so I apologize if it has!

Sally at Heart of Water Jewels on Etsy is going to do my opal. I was going to do silver, but after sending her pictures of it, she recommended yellow gold. It''s going to be the Pillbox setting. Yellow gold is fine, but she asked if I''d prefer 14k or 18k. She said sometimes the 18k doesn''t flatter fair/blonde people and that 14k might be better.

I''ve never had any jewelry in 18k, it''s always been 14k or 10k even. Sooo my question is, how much of a difference in color is it between the 2? I don''t make jewelry, so I figured I''d just go w/what she suggests. I''m also curious b/c the ring I''ve got my eye on from Caleb Meyer is 18k, and if it''s not going to look good on me, then I want to rethink things! I don''t want the gold color to look out of place on my pale fishbelly white fingers!

 

[oldmancoyote]

It will depend on the alloy used. You can get redder, whiter and yellower (or even greener) alloys in 18 and 14k. In general, colours other than yellow can be more intense in 14k because there is less gold (which is yellow).

 

[AGBF]

packrat, there are a lot of threads on this . I will try to link at least one to this thread for you. However, the short answer, from me, is don't worry about high karat gold if you are a fair blonde. (High karat gold is gold that has more gold and less other metal in the alloy or is pure gold). 18K gold is at least close to being high karat gold, even if not everyone would consider it high karat! It is yellower than 14K since it has more gold in the mix and gold is yellow.

(I am not going to get into what happens when one deliberately adds alloys in order to color the gold. I am going to asume that we are dealing with yellow gold here for the sake of simplicity. OK? Oldmancoyote is giving you the advanced course, but I don't see the need for it at the moment.)

I can tell you not to worry about 18K gold because I am a fair blonde and 18K yellow gold looks great on me. Yellow gold looks better on me than platinum or white gold. I think that platinum looks good on women with tans. I think yellow gold looks good on women with fair skin. If we have pink tones in our skin, we don't look sallow when we wear the very yellow gold.

I have some new pieces of designer high karat gold now, but almost all my classic, good jewelry is 18K yellow gold!

AGBF

 

[AGBF]

In this thread on yellow gold there is some discussion of which metals look good on people with fair skin and which metals look good on people with dark skin, etcetera. You may find it relevant.


AGBF

 

[packrat]

Cool-thanks for the link! I figured there were a bunch of threads but..I plead laziness!