Jewelry 101: How to Choose the Right Metal

Welcome to the world of designing your own special piece of jewelry! With the advent of online buying of rare and unusual gems, custom CAD design and printing and AI illustrations, personalizing your bespoke design has become more interesting than ever. With this, however, come some unique challenges you have to master. This 101 series of blogs is designed to help you with just that: making sure your piece is the best the design world has to offer, customized to your own taste.

You might think that the type of metal you choose to make your piece is merely a matter of which color metal you like or wear the most. But there are important other differences to consider, especially because if you have arrived at CRD, you will be working with colored gemstones instead of diamonds.

First off, I should say that of course the color of the metal matters. Some skin tones for example, do not lend themselves to certain metals – rose gold can disappear on pale skin and yellow gold can look garish on occasion. So it is important that you have looked at the different metals in person and are comfortable with the color you pick. Remember also that the metal color changes with higher carats: yellow gold becomes more intense, rose gold becomes softer (because the copper content decreases).

The other important factors to consider are: metal weight and cost, manufacturing cost, and gemstone type and color.

Metal Weight and Cost:

Here’s a little known fact about metals that we often forget to consider: the weights of metals can differ drastically. So before you calculate the cost of the piece you are making, you need to get the exact weight. If your design is based on 14Kt yellow gold but you are considering platinum instead, you need to convert the weight. Platinum is heavier than gold, which means that the piece itself will be heavier to wear and it might cost more despite the fact that platinum is cheaper than 14kt yellow gold per ounce. Here is a metal conversion chart that you can use to figure out the weight difference between metals.

Also don’t forget to consider that you may find a platinum design heavier to wear around your finger, neck, or on your ears. As a rule of thumb, silver weighs the least, then it’s 14kt, 18kt, and the heaviest is platinum.

Finally, in terms of cost, the order is quite similar but depending on the gold price – the most volatile of the fine metals – platinum sometimes comes out costing less than 18 kt gold and sometimes more. The difference between the gold colors is actually marginal, so you can safely ignore it.

Manufacturing Cost:

Manufacturing cost includes several factors: CAD design, 3D printing, casting cost, pre polish, setting and final polish, as well as assembly: adding a bail and jump rings, soldering settings between chains, etc. The main factor to consider when adding metal to the equation is this: using a lesser metal, i.e. silver, does not make the manufacturing any cheaper than using 18 kt gold for example. This means that if you make a silver piece that is expensive to manufacture, you may be wasting money. Silver is a soft metal and prongs easily open up or break off, meaning that silver jewelry has less longevity than gold or platinum. This is a reason why we at CRD discourage work in silver. Silver is better for costume jewelry – or any other piece that is not expected to last or is simple and cheap to make.

Gemstone Type:

Traditionally, most jewelry is made with diamonds – the hardest gemstone on the planet. As a result, they can be set into any metal and the setter can use as much force as he needs to bend the metal over the gem. Colored gems, by contrast, are not all the same, and many of them are far softer than diamonds, or they have cleavage, meaning that they can easily split in two when pressure is applied from the wrong direction. Softer gems require different treatment and therefore different metal. The softest metal you can work with is silver, after that it’s platinum and high carat yellow gold. White and rose gold are harder metals. Therefore, gems like hauyne, rhodochrosite, paraiba, should ideally be set in platinum or 18 kt yellow gold, whereas sapphires, garnets, and spinels can be set into any metal.

Gemstone Color:

From the design perspective, the most important thing you want to consider is whether the metal you are using works with the color or colors of your design. I have written an entire blog on this already, which you can access here.

For a quick summary, think of white metals as a background color, meaning that they tend not to run any kind of interference with design. Yellow metals add color, and sometimes that can look amazing (i.e. yellow metal and pink tones) and sometimes it can look garish (not everyone likes emerald in yellow gold for example). Rose tone metals are also fairly neutral but some skin tones do not work well with it. On my skin for instance, rose gold blends very much with my skin tone and that does not always look the way I want it to. Here are some items from our hexagon collection using a variety of gems and metals: