Nothing catches your eye quite like the glint and warm richness of gold. Gold jewelry has been a favorite of civilizations around the world for millennia.

But how much do you really know about what’s really in gold jewelry? With today’s soaring prices, it’s important that you have all the information you need when looking at purchasing gold pieces for your store or personal collection. In this article, we’ll discuss the different types of processes used to make gold jewelry, and why we choose to feature gold vermeil in our product line.

Crafting Gold

As a metal, gold is soft, so to use it to make jewelry, it must be bonded to something; the karat weight measurement is used to measure the amount of pure gold in an item. A piece that is 24 karat is 100 percent gold; an 18-karat gold chain, for example, is 75 percent gold, and the remaining 25 percent is other alloys like brass or copper. The higher the karat count, the more gold the piece contains.

• Solid gold is the most expensive gold used to make jewelry. Like its name says, this gold is solid inside and out; the gold and the alloys are mixed evenly throughout the piece. These are high quality pieces of jewelry, but also come with a high price tag.

• Gold filled refers to a process that takes a piece of metal and coats it with pure gold; this piece of jewelry must contain at least five percent gold. It’s durable, but expensive, and since the base metal is an alloy, there is a risk of an allergic reaction occurring.

• Gold plating is the most inexpensive. A thin plate of gold is placed on top of an alloy, usually brass or copper. But there is no standard as to how thin or thick the gold can be, or what the alloy has to be, resulting in cheap jewelry that tarnishes and chips quickly, often only after a couple of months.

• Gold vermeil is what we use at Nugent Jewelry. Gold vermeil is legally regulated, and certified. It’s made by coating a sterling silver base with a layer of gold that’s at least 2.5 microns thick. At Nugent Jewelry, we only use 18 karat gold for the quality and richness of color, and the sterling silver base is our certified 100% USA recycled, meaning there is very little copper touching your skin, making our gold vermeil pieces skin-friendly and hypoallergenic. Another advantage of having a low copper content in this blend is that the gold maintains its luster, while also minimizing the potential for tarnishing. We love the fact we can guarantee our silver is almost 94 percent pure, above the standard of 92.5, and that our gold vermeil exceeds the certified standard.