Understanding Gold Markings
Jewelry Mall Newsletter
April 26, 2005
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Contents:
- Make Your Gifts Extra Special
- Win a $100 Gift Certificate to Amazon
- Updated Pages
- Feature Article: Understanding Gold Markings
- Webmaster Help
- Request for Feedback
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Make Your Gifts Extra Special
Learn how to create gifts that are caring, loving and memorable.
Have the time and money you spend on gift shopping really make
a difference.
Claim your thank you gift for subscribing to our newsletter:
10 Ways to Make Your Gift Extra Special
Subscribe to this newsletter here
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Win a $100 Gift Certificate to Amazon.com
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Updated Pages
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Feature Article: Understanding Gold Markings
Being an educated gold buyer helps save you money.
You can truly know what you are buying, and how much gold
your jewelry contains.
1) Who Grades Gold?
The Federal Trade Commission is the U.S. consumer's protection
against fraud in jewelry appraisal, identification and grading
standards. The agency works diligently with the jewelry industry
to unravel the mystery of understanding the stamped hallmarks
that guarantee the purity of metal used by jewelers.
2) What is a Karat?
The purity of gold is measured in karats, which are expressed in
units of 24ths. Thus, pure gold is 24-karat or 100 percent gold,
18-karat is 75 percent gold, 14-karat is 58.5 percent gold,
and so on.
Gold jewelry is priced according to its purity, or karat weight.
A karat, or carat, is 1/24th part of pure gold. This pure gold
is commonly alloyed with other metals in increase its hardness and
decrease its cost.
In other words:
- 10K gold should be priced much less than 18K gold.
(The lower the karat the less expensive - unless fancy design.)
- 24K gold is rather soft and needs extra care to avoid damage. It is pure gold (occassionally marked "pg").
3) What Types of Gold are there?
COLORED GOLDS
There is no such thing as naturally occurring rose, white or
green gold. Gold itself is only one color: yellow. All of
other "colors" are a mixture of pure 24K yellow gold with
various other metals. The percentage of the other metals
(copper, silver, zinc, nickel) produces the different shades
of gold. Any karat other than 24K gold (pure gold) is called
an "alloy".
YELLOW GOLD
24k gold by definition will always be "Yellow Gold" as it
is pure gold. However, one can still maintain a color close
to this yellow while adding other metals to create 10K, 14K
and 18K yellow gold. These alloys will be more durable than
the pure 24K gold.
ROSE GOLD
Rose gold, known by other names such as pink gold or red gold,
is created by increasing the copper-colored alloys and
decreasing the any silver-colored additives.
WHITE GOLD
By increasing lighter alloys of silver, zinc, nickel and
copper tone down the yellow gold. The resulting 14K white
gold contains as much gold as 14K yellow gold but is nearly
white in color, though it still carries diminutive yellowish hint.
GREEN GOLD
With its subtle, natural appearance, green gold is best showcased
in jewelry that combines yellow, white and pink gold. An alloy
of pure yellow gold and pure silver produce the green tint. For
durability, harder metals such as nickel or zinc can be used.
To create true 14K green gold, jewelers use 14 parts yellow
gold and ten parts silver. 18K green gold would contain
eighteen parts yellow gold and six parts silver.
Green gold can be hard to find.
GOLD FILL
Because of the potential for deception, the FTC helps consumers
understand the word "gold" when used for an industry product
that is not composed throughout of gold or a gold alloy, but is
surface-plated or coated with gold alloy. The word "Gold" or its
abbreviation must be adequately defined and a statement should
be written that the product or its parts are only surface-plated.
Terms such as "Gold Filled," "Rolled Gold Plate,"
"Rolled Gold Plated," "Gold Overlay," or any abbreviation
follow the same FTC demands.
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Webmaster Help
When you maintain a website, it is alot easier to change
one file rather than many. So, there is a way to have any
code that is repeated on every page to be in a separate file.
- Make sure host supports Server Side Includes
First, make sure your ISP or website hosting company
supports server side includes (most do).
If they do not, you may wish to change providers to one
that does depending on how many web pages you have
(or plan to have) on your site.
- Create a separate file with repeated code
If the bottom of your pages all have the same footer,
you could put the footer section into its own file,
ie. footer.htm
- Replace the chunk of code with a single line in each file
Then replace the chunk of code with a line like:
< !--#include file="footer.htm" -- >
- Make sure your html file is executable
Most ISPs will require your file to be executable to
have it work.
- As Each section is different do one section at a time
Only do one section at a time. That is, have your header
be in a different file than your footer.
- Enjoy the ease of updating all your pages at once by updating
a single file.
Once this is all in place you can update all pages at once
(again and again). To update all the footers of every page
you would then simply update footer.htm and all pages would
be updated.
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Request for Feedback
If you have any suggestions/requests of what you would like
to see in in this newsletter or in Jewelry Mall - please
write us:
newsletter@jewelrymall.com
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Thank you!
Lorraine & Jason Venner
Jewelry Mall - helping you find gemstones and jewelry
lorraine@jewelrymall.com
http://www.jewelrymall.com
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