Metal is the choice people make fastest and regret most often. It changes the price, the upkeep, how the diamond reads, and how the piece looks against your skin every day for years. It is worth five minutes.
Every design we make comes in yellow, white or rose gold. Most are offered in 14K, many in 18K as well, and around a hundred designs can be made in platinum.
What the karat number means
14K gold is 58.5% pure gold. 18K is 75%. The rest is other metals mixed in to give the alloy its colour and its strength, because pure gold on its own is too soft to hold a stone.
18K has a deeper, warmer colour. You can see the difference side by side, though rarely across a room. It also costs more, and being softer, it marks a little more readily.
14K is harder and stands up better to daily knocks. For a ring worn every day, particularly on a hand that does things, it is the sensible default and the reason most of our catalogue is built around it.
Neither is better quality. They are different trade-offs between colour and hardness.
The three colours
Yellow gold is the alloy closest to how gold looks on its own. It flatters warm skin tones, and it does something useful for the stone: a diamond a grade or two down the colour scale reads better in yellow gold than in a white metal, because there is nothing nearby making it look warm by comparison. If you are buying carefully rather than chasing a top colour grade, yellow gold gives you somewhere to save.
White gold is gold alloyed with white metals and then plated with rhodium to get that bright cool finish. The plating is the thing to know about. It wears with time, more quickly on a ring than on earrings, and the warmer gold underneath starts to show through. Re-plating is routine and inexpensive, but it is a maintenance job that recurs.
Rose gold takes its colour from copper in the alloy. More copper gives a deeper pink. It does not need plating, so the colour is permanent, and the copper makes it a touch harder than the equivalent yellow. It suits most skin tones and it dates less than people expect.
Where platinum earns its cost
Platinum is naturally white, so it never needs plating and the colour it has on day one is the colour it has in thirty years.
It is also considerably denser than gold, which is most of why a platinum ring costs more: you are paying for more grams of a more expensive metal to fill the same shape. It feels heavier on the hand, which some people love and others notice all day.
Platinum does not so much lose metal when it scratches as move it. Over years that builds a soft satin patina rather than a worn-down band. If you like that, it is a genuine advantage. If you want it bright, it polishes back.
For a piece meant to be worn constantly and never thought about, platinum is the low-maintenance answer.
Mixing metals
You can wear yellow and white together and it looks deliberate rather than accidental, provided the pieces have some other thing in common, whether that is scale, finish or the shapes involved.
One practical caution. Rings worn side by side rub, and over years the softer of the two loses more metal. If you are stacking a platinum band against a 14K one, expect the gold to show it first.
If you cannot decide
Look at what is already in your jewellery box. Whatever colour dominates is what you reach for without thinking, and a new piece in that colour will get worn far more than a beautiful one in the other.
Every product page lists the metals that design can be made in. If a piece you like is not offered in the metal you want, write to us before assuming the answer is no.