Pure gold is a very soft metal. That is why alloys of other metals are added to gold in the manufacture of jewelry - ligature. This gives strength and durability to gold jewelry. The ligature contains such metals as silver, copper, palladium, nickel. In addition to rigidity, impurities from other metals give gold almost any shade and even color, which makes it possible to diversify design solutions in jewelry.
gold standard
In different countries, gold alloys are used for jewelry, different in composition and quality. For example, the inhabitants of Japan prefer precious jewelry made of pure gold, i.e. from gold of the highest standard.
The fineness is the determination of the value of precious metals, which shows the ratio of the metal to the ligature. The higher the purity of "gold", the more valuable it is. There are two main sampling systems: metric and carat.
In the metric system, a gram is taken as a unit of measure in the ratio of pure gold to a ligature of 1 to 1000. In other words, the 585th test shows that 1000 grams of the alloy contains 585 grams of gold, and the remaining 415 is a ligature. The metric system is used in Russia and the CIS countries, in other countries the gold standard is measured in carats. The gold to ligature ratio is 1/24. Accordingly, the highest fineness is 24 carats.
In the Russian Federation, the following samples are established for gold jewelry: 375, 500, 585, 750, 958, 999. To simplify international trade in gold, there is a ratio of samples of the metric and carat systems. So, an alloy with a proportion of pure gold 99.9% has a 999 fineness, which corresponds to 24 carats. 958 fineness equals 23 carats (23/24 = 0.958), etc.
583 and 585 - difference between samples
Since 1927, the spool probing system in Russia has changed to the metric system. In accordance with the new standard, the following gold samples were introduced: 375, 500, 583, 750, 958.
Gold of 583 assay value, corresponding to 14 carats, was widespread on the territory of the USSR, but in many countries of the world this standard was considered lower than the quality of 14 carat gold, which greatly reduced the cost of Russian gold on the international market. That is why the government decided to increase the sample to 585. The 585th sample was officially recognized in 1994. In fact, 583 is an outdated sample, and differs from 585 only in the difference in sample size.
There is an opinion that there is a direct relationship between color and sample size. This is not entirely true. In addition to gold of the highest standard, which is a pure metal with an insignificant amount of natural impurities, the rest of the alloys of this precious metal contain a certain mass of ligature. The intensity of the color, the shade depends on what kind of metals are used to obtain the gold alloy, i.e. gold items of one sample can have many colors and shades. For example, gold 585-carat can be white, yellow, green, red with an equal content of the ligature. By the way, it was customary to add more copper to 583-carat gold, so jewelry made of such gold had a red tint.
