Gold Rings

The subtle gleam of gold has the power to attract the human eye even as a tiny fragment hardly visible amidst a sea of colorful debris. It has spellbound powerful conquerors, intrepid adventurers, talented artists, lords, ladies and the common man through the ages, and has lost none of its appeal today.

Gold is prized especially for one particular property it possesses – its ability to weather extreme conditions without losing much of its luster. It is for this fortitude that it has come to represent the power of love between a couple – the ideal material for a wedding ring.

Gold wedding rings are the most traditional of matrimonial rings. For a long time, gold was the most valuable material a ring could be made of, and that allowed it to naturally assume a place at the altar.

Another property of gold that makes it so desirable as a material for jewellery in general is its malleability. This refers to the softness of a material.

Despite its high density – weight for a given volume – pure gold can be so easily manipulated just by the hands that it is only rarely used in its purest form, 24 karats, especially for jewellery. Instead gold is combined with other metals like silver, copper, or even other alloys to decrease its malleability and increase its hardness.

Although this makes the resulting gold slightly harder to work with for a goldsmith attempting to etch a design or a set of initials into it, it makes the designs more resilient. In fact, those designs would lose their shape and detail rather quickly had they been engraved into pure gold.

Plain jewellery is instead usually made of 22 karat gold. Also called 916 gold (referring to its pure gold content of 91.6%), this alloy of gold is ideal for simple, unadorned wedding bands. It is of high purity, can be engraved with letters easily, and is less prone to deformation than 24 karat gold.

However, even 22 karat gold is too soft to be used for wedding ring designs that include set diamonds or other gemstones. If 22 karat gold was used for studded jewellery, it would still carry the risk of everyday bumps and brushes warping the gold and loosening the stones.

Instead, 18 or 9ct is commonly used for wedding rings. The composition of gold in 18ct is 75% by weight and the remaining with copper and other metals. 9ct gold offers the perfect balance for wedding rings as they are much harder and does not lose shape easily compared to higher karat gold rings, and is the most popular choice for mens gold rings in New Zealand.

They are not the only option, though – 18ct gold (75% pure gold) and even 10 karat gold (41.6% pure gold) are also option we can have your ring made to.

Gold rings do not necessarily have to be of the yellow color most of us associate with gold. Instead, using specific combinations of other metals, we now commonly see White Gold and Rose Gold rings as well.

Today, despite a myriad of options available to couples to symbolize their matrimony, gold wedding bands are still a very popular choice

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