Jewelry Tips: Yellow gold is gold in its natural state, its shades varying with impurities or when alloyed (mixed with other metals), but even white gold is yellow-tinged. White gold can be of several alloys: Nickel is the least expensive, but some people are allergic to nickel. Platinum, iridium and palladium make more expensive, hypo-allergenic alloys. The whitest gold is actually rhodium-plated gold; this plating won’t chip, but does wear off and must be renewed periodically to maintain its best appearance. Other alloys include copper, which makes rose gold and pink gold; silver, which makes green gold; and iron, which makes blue gold.

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Jewelry Tips: A very common element, titanium remained unknown until the late 19th century and had no industrial value until the mid-20th, when economical processing methods were developed (a happy coincidence, as the then-expanding aerospace industry found titanium indispensable). Discovered in the late 18th Century, tungsten or wolfram, was first distilled from the mineral wolframite. Its high melting point is prized for things like light bulb filaments; added to other metals, it forms super dense alloys used in products ranging from golf club heads to weapons. Both are strong as steel–titanium at about half the weight, tungsten at about twice the weight–and able to alloy with numerous other metals, making them indispensable to modern industry.

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Jewelry Tips: A warning–some silver isn’t silver at all. “Nickel silver” (also known as German silver or alpaca silver, along with a few other trade names) is any alloy of copper with nickel or zinc, and sometimes antimony, tin, lead or cadmium. It is silver tone, not silver alloy, and was a low-priced silver substitute in the 19th Century, mostly as a base layer for silver-plating. Because some of these metals are toxic, its use is now heavily restricted. In the US, the principal use of nickel silver is the nickel (5-cent coins are 750/250 copper/nickel). By law, these alloys cannot be marketed in the US as silver.

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