Every Jewellery Metal Ranked (Some Are Terrible)

0:00 I've been working with precious metals since I was 16 years old. In that time, I've melted them, cast them, broken them, resized them, repaired them, and seen exactly how they fail in the real world. A lot of the jewelry sold in malls and online isn't at all designed for longevity. It's instead designed for cost, aesthetics, and margins. So, today, I'm ranking the major jewelry metals from absolute liability to genuine heirloom quality. This is from the perspective of a jewelry designer, judging them on durability, workability, aesthetics, and long-term value. Let's start with the one that calls itself indestructible. Tungsten carbide is marketed as the ultimate indestructible scratch proof Navy Seal tactical man ring. But here is the reality of it. Extreme hardness pretty much always comes with extreme brittleness. In an industrial machine shop, it's an elite material because you

0:45 can't scratch it. But as a ring, it's almost as brittle as ceramic. If you drop it on a bathroom tile or smack it against a rock, it can literally shatter into pieces. And if you slam your hand in a car door and your finger swells, the emergency room can't cut it off. They have to put your hand in a vice grip and crack the ring off your finger. It's a massive structural liability masquerading as tough. I'm giving it an F tier. And if that surprised you, just wait till we get to white gold. Titanium and stainless steel. These are very popular metals for fashion jewelry because they're extremely cheap, extremely durable, but that durability comes at a cost. A jeweler can't set stones in them, can't cast them, can't resize them, and the color can be the same as a stainless steel fork. I'm not really a fast fashion guy, so I'm going to have to drop these into D tier. Goldplated pot metal and gold oile. Even mentioning these materials is giving

1:30 them too much credit. The flash plating on shitty AliExpress jewelry is 40 to 200 times thinner than a neuron. The thought of this plating is at least 40 times thicker than the actual plating. It can wear off within days and turns your finger weird colors. Probably toxic. Who knows what this shit's made of. Ztier VM is the exact same thing, but with a slightly thicker plating, at least 2.5 microns. So, it could last maybe a year or two if you're careful. But instead of being $3 from T-Mu, you have actual brands trying to charge $400 for fancy plating. So, it's also going into F tier. Unplated copper and brass. I guess the appeal of these is that they're cool, rustic, bohemian, earthy metals. I ranked goldplated brass in Ztier because it's basically a scam. But unplated brass and copper go slightly higher in D tier because at least they're honest. They aren't pretending to be something else, but they're still base metals,

2:16 which means they develop a heavy green brown patina, and they make your hands smell like loose change. They can also turn your skin green. Cool aesthetic if you're into that sort of thing, but horrible maintenance. All right, that's the stuff optimized for marketing claims or just generally recognized to not be very good. Now, let's talk about the metals that people actually take seriously, the industry standards. Sterling silver. Okay, this might be a bit controversial, but despite being the industry standard silver alloy, standard cerling is not very impressive. It was standardized about a thousand years ago in 1158. So, in terms of material science, it's extraordinarily outdated, tarnishes like crazy, develops deep fire scale when you work with it, and the copper content reacts with your sweat and turns your skin black. Furthermore, it's quite soft. If you set a valuable stone in standard sterling prongs, you are literally just waiting to lose it. With modern metalology, I don't see any

3:02 reason to still be using an alloy that actively fights both the jeweler and the customer. It's going in C tier. This one's controversial, but I can't help but believe it. The way I always explain this is imagine you bought a brand new white car. The dealer hands you the keys and says, "Hey, just so you know, the car is actually pale yellow. The white is just a temporary coating. You're going to have to come back here every 12 months and pay us 250 bucks to paint it again." Completely ridiculous, right? But that's exactly what the bridal industry does with white gold. Honest unplated white gold is actually a warm pale gray. But the industry thinks everyone wants bright white chrome, so they dip it into rodeium to hide the actual gold color. That plating starts to wear off in 6 to 12 months, and suddenly your $8,000 engagement ring is starting to look a bit like patchy timu jewelry. You're essentially now trapped in a yearly subscription fee just to

3:48 maintain your own ring. What's even more ridiculous is if I dip a $50 silver ring in rodium, it looks pretty much identical to a $3,000 gold ring dipped in rodium. To be honest, even the unplated silver might be hard for most people to differentiate from white gold. So, why are you even paying over $200 a gram for gold just to paint over the top of it? And here's the ultimate kicker. Rodium plating became popular in the mid- 20th century as a cheap way to mimic the look of platinum. Because back then, platinum was super expensive compared to gold. But today, platinum is actually cheaper than gold. So, you're paying more money for a cheap imitation of something you could just buy for less money. It's a tradition that stuck around for decades, even though there are much better material options available today. For me, that puts it firmly into E tier. Palladium white gold is A tier. Wait, what if commercial white gold is A tier?

4:34 Why is white gold back on the board in A tier? Because this isn't plated. This is platium white gold. To get rid of the yellow color, standard white gold is bleached using nickel. Now, from a pure engineering perspective, nickel is amazing. It's a powerful bleaching agent. It gives the metal great structural hardness for holding diamonds, and it is dirt cheap. But there is a bit of a biological flaw. Nickel is one of the most common skin allergens on the planet. It's literally the reason cheap jewelry gives you a red rash and makes your skin peel. Nearly 20% of women are allergic to it to the point where the EU actually had to pass laws restricting its use. But palladium white gold swaps out this toxic filler for palladium, a premium hypoallergenic metal part of the palladium group metals family. I leave it completely unplated, so you get this honest unique warm gray color. And because of the palladium, it's actually one of the all round strongest gold alloys on the board. It's

5:20 tough, it's tasteful, and it won't destroy your skin. A tier 18 karat specifically gets an S tier because the color is so cool. Platinum 950. Platinum group metal alloys are the cream of the crawl. Platinum 950 is 95% platinum with 5% ruinium aridium or cobalt. Heavy, tough, doesn't wear down. It just displaces. It's a bit of a pain to work with as a jeweler because the melting point is so high that you need specific gear to solder it and it's a bit gummy to sand and file. But the end result for the customer is so good that it can't be anywhere other than S tier. So, at this point, you might just be thinking, "All the cheap alloys are really and all the expensive alloys are really good." But that's not always the case. Let's make an example of 24 karat gold. I've been seeing some new jewelry brands talking about how 24 karat gold is like

6:05 the only real gold alloy and that you're getting scammed if you buy 14 karat or something because it's not 100% gold. This is very strange to me. There's a reason you don't wear 24 karat gold. It's the softest, precious metal. You can bend thick rods of it with your hand. You can literally mark it with your fingernail. 24 karat gold is an investment. You have gold bars made of stuff to store your money in. But if you wear a 24 karat gold ring for a year, I'd be terrified to see what it looks like by the end of it. It's a lovely rich orange gold tone. No because it's 100% gold. But for jewelry, it's going to go into D tier. It's also stupidly expensive. All right, so how about fine silver? Completely pure. It's a bit of a wild card. Intuitively, it feels like the highest purity alloys should be the best. 999 silver also just sounds really premium. The reality is that we add different metals into our alloys for a

6:52 reason. With soft metals, maximum purity also equals maximum weakness because it has absolutely no copper or geranium in it to harden the atomic lattice. It is structurally weak and very easy to deform. If you want a pendant that sits on your chest and never really takes a hit, it's probably fine. But if you make a ring out of it, it's probably going to bend the first time you grab a door handle. Going to go into D tier. Purple gold and blue gold. Look, everyone loves these. The N red video brought heaps of attention to purple gold. But these are not really jewelry metals. They're into metallic compounds. It's easier to just not think of them as metals at all, but rather very brittle crystals. They shatter, suck to cast with, or work with, and are extremely expensive. Purple gold can work if you treat it like a gemstone rather than an alloy. Lee in Singapore are famous for pioneering purple gold jewelry that

7:38 isn't a total disaster. That's because they don't treat it like a casting or workable alloy and instead just embed little chunks of it into other more sensible metals. probably Dtier for both of these. Green gold or electrum? You've probably never seen green gold before, but it's actually one of the oldest precious metal alloys on Earth. The ancients called it Electrum. I was actually in talks with some of my casting partners to get a custom 16 karat green gold alloy for the studio. But we're running into a brutal metallological paradox. To get that specific pale greenish color, you have to mix pure gold with silver. That's it. Two soft metals. If you try to harden the alloy by adding very much copper at all, you instantly dilute the silver and kill the green color. So, I stuck at around 3 to 5%. Technically, there is a chemical cheat code. You can get an intense almost green color if you alloy it with cadmium. The problem is

8:24 that cadmium is really toxic. If I melt that in the studio, the heavy metal fumes will literally put me in the hospital. And wearing a known carcinogen on your finger every day is a spectacularly bad idea. So, we refuse to touch it. You can't really have a green alloy that's also as strong as a normal gold alloy. The chemistry doesn't allow it. It is historically fascinating and as a custom art piece, I love it. But for a ring you're going to wear every single day, it's pretty soft and it scratches quite easily. Cool history, but compromised hardware. Ctier. So, you're starting to see a pattern here. Purity alone, it doesn't make something better. Color alone doesn't make something better. And strength alone doesn't make an alloy better. The best alloys are engineered around trade-offs. So, in the interest of not boring you, I'm going to clump all the different carrots of yellow gold together. In general, yellow gold is an absolute classic. All my heirloom jewelry is made

9:10 from the stuff. It's awesome. It doesn't tarnish. It's very durable depending on the carrot. And it is never going out of fashion. It's lovely to work with and very cooperative and casting. And finally, it takes a nice polish and holds it well. It also maintains its monetary value very well or even goes up depending on how close the global economy is to collapsing. Let's get more specific. 18 karat. 18 karat yellow is awesome. It's a very rich yellow tone, very dense and heavy. Great to work with. However, due to the high gold content, it's obviously quite expensive and not the strongest. You can bend it pretty easily if you aren't careful. To me, it's sort of like a dress alloy. I wouldn't be wearing it daily, but if you're careful with it, it is the best looking gold alloy, so it goes in a tier. 9 or 10 karat yellow. 10 karat is more common in the US, but functionally it's the same thing as 9 karat. This is a

9:57 very durable alloy due to the high zinc and copper content, and if it contains a fair bit of copper, it has a very art deco classic coloration. I actually really like the tone of slightly bronzy 9 karat gold, but some 9 karat these days can be quite unsaturated and it might almost read as being slightly beige rather than gold. This is because it would contain more silver and zinc than copper. This is a great gold alley for people who work with their hands a lot and like a more classic look. I'm going to have to give it an A tier. 14 karat yellow gold. Classic, pretty decent yellow color depending on the exact alley composition, but also very durable. You're taking essentially the best bits of 18 karat and the best bits of 9 karat and mixing them together. It's pretty much as durable as 9 karat but with a lot more yellow richness. This is my standard yellow gold alley recommendation for all custom pieces that I do. S tier.

10:49 Earlier I put standard sterling into seed tier and called it 12th century tech. So what happens if you redesign silver using modern material science? This is our GTM 940. Instead of relying heavily on copper, it replaces part of that copper with geranium and extra silver. That change does two things. First, it enables passivation. The geranium reacts with oxygen to create a thin transparent surface layer of germanmanium oxide. This slows tarnish, similar in principle to the chromium in stainless steel. Secondly, it allows precipitation hardening. When you finish forging a standard sterling silver ring, the hardness is what it is. You can't really do much with it. But with Argentium, with the correct thermal cycle, you can push to around 130 to 140 vicers. That puts a silver alloy into the same structural range as many platinum and white gold systems, which is pretty remarkable considering that

11:35 silver alloys have historically been the softer highmaintenance metals. But there are some drawbacks. It costs more because of the alloy and casting complexity and it is softer in its annealed state. If a jeweler doesn't heat treat it properly, you've essentially made more expensive sterling. And the tarnish resistance only works if it's properly pivated. Otherwise, it'll tarnish just like sterling. It's a higher skill floor alloy, but in the hands of someone who understands it, you get a silver that's brighter, harder, more time resistant, and engineered for longevity. From the perspective of durability, workability, and long-term value, it has to be in S tier. So, once you understand that alloys are engineered trade-offs, the whole industry looks a bit different. You stop asking what's the most expensive or what's the purest, and you start asking what was this designed to optimize? Cost, color, tradition, or

12:22 longevity? Some metals are built for margin, some are built for marketing, and a few are built to last. If you want to go deeper into the physics, history, and other secrets of the jewelry industry, you can access my book for free in the description. And if you're curious what this metall looks like when it's actually applied, the pieces I make are on my website. Otherwise, now you know what you're putting on your hand. I'll see you in the next one.