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Understanding Gold Markings

Jewelry Mall Newsletter
April 26, 2005

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Contents:

  1. Make Your Gifts Extra Special
  2. Win a $100 Gift Certificate to Amazon
  3. Updated Pages
  4. Feature Article: Understanding Gold Markings
  5. Webmaster Help
  6. 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

    As Amazon Jewelry section is getting bigger and bigger, we thought we'd celebrate by having a contest to win a $100 gift certificate to Amazon.

    Enter to win here: Contest

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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.

    1. 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.

    2. 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

    3. 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" -- >

    4. Make sure your html file is executable

      Most ISPs will require your file to be executable to have it work.

    5. 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.

    6. 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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