{"id":12808,"date":"2017-07-05T21:22:56","date_gmt":"2017-07-05T21:22:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.truefacet.com\/guide\/?p=12808"},"modified":"2018-08-16T15:47:18","modified_gmt":"2018-08-16T19:47:18","slug":"understanding-white-gold-rhodium-plating","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.truefacet.com\/guide\/understanding-white-gold-rhodium-plating\/","title":{"rendered":"Understanding White Gold and Rhodium Plating"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"TrueFacet<\/a><\/div>

White gold jewelry gets that enviable shine from a rhodium plating. We unpack rhodium plating, from how it grew into industry standard, its limitations as a precious metal and how thick rhodium plating on your jewelry should be.<\/p>\n

White Gold\u2019s Rise in Popularity<\/strong>
\nWhite gold only became popular in the last few decades. During World War II, wartime efforts needed all available platinum and palladium to manufacture military equipment. In turn, jewelers were looking for an alternate precious metal as a viable substitute.<\/p>\n

Enter white gold.<\/p>\n

Years before this, jewelers combined yellow gold with the alloying (and \u201cbleaching\u201d) metal nickel to create white gold. However, with the strict rationing of platinum in the 1940s, white gold\u2019s popularity took off as a platinum look alike. Once World War II ended and platinum became available again, white gold remained a popular jewelry making material, largely because it\u2019s roughly four times less expensive than platinum.<\/p>\n

The Commercialization of Rhodium Plating<\/strong>
\nSince then, jewelers have vastly improved the everyday wearability of white gold by adding a \u201ctop coat\u201d of rhodium plating. Before rhodium plating became widespread, white gold made with nickel would quickly darken when exposed to chlorine and certain cleaning products. Rhodium plating eliminated that rapid discoloration.<\/p>\n

Rhodium plating gives white gold that desired high-shine and white-hot mirror effect. Although rhodium is a member of the platinum family, it is primarily used to improve the jewelry\u2019s aesthetic\u2014not necessarily to protect the underlying white gold from everyday bumps and scrapes. Rhodium will fade away with frequent wear so you will need to have your most-worn white gold jewelry pieces re-plated roughly every six months.<\/p>\n

Understanding Rhodium Plating Thickness<\/strong>
\nWhite gold jewelry also needs to be regularly re-plated because the thickness of rhodium plating is incredibly thin, ranging from 0.5 \u2013 2.5 microns. (For comparison, a strand from a spider\u2019s silk web is 3 microns.) As durable as rhodium is as a metal, its thin coating on your white gold jewelry means it is easily scratched and worn.<\/p>\n

Here are the expert recommended thickness coatings, pending the item being rhodium plated:<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

White gold jewelry gets that enviable shine from a rhodium plating. We unpack rhodium plating, from how it grew into industry standard, its limitations as a precious metal and how thick rhodium plating on your jewelry should be. White Gold\u2019s Rise in Popularity White gold only became popular in the last few decades. During World […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":12815,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[56,18,611,156],"class_list":["post-12808","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-education","tag-gold","tag-jewelry","tag-rhodium-plating","tag-white-gold"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.truefacet.com\/guide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12808","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.truefacet.com\/guide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.truefacet.com\/guide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.truefacet.com\/guide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.truefacet.com\/guide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12808"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.truefacet.com\/guide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12808\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17806,"href":"https:\/\/www.truefacet.com\/guide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12808\/revisions\/17806"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.truefacet.com\/guide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12815"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.truefacet.com\/guide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12808"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.truefacet.com\/guide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12808"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.truefacet.com\/guide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12808"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}