Do you want to know what does gold plated mean? There are various gold-plated items you can find in everyday life, such as rings, necklaces, earrings, circuit boards, expensive watches, and many others. Even Olympic gold medals are gold plated. It’s very common for anyone to find gold-plated items nowadays, and they are often quite cheap to buy when compared to their 100% pure gold counterparts.
Gold Plating Explained
Gold plating means coating the base metal surface of any item, such as jewelries, with gold, which is often given in thin layers. For instance, if a jewelry item is gold plated, it means that the item uses a thin layer of gold on its surface, whereas the base metal could be anything from silver, copper, and other metals. By plating the base metal with gold, the gold-plated item will look like any regular gold item, but it will be cheaper because it doesn’t use 100% pure gold.
Most people use gold-plated jewelries to save money on the jewelry prices, as the gold-plated jewelries will use only a small portion of gold as the surface coatings. It means you don’t need to spend money to buy the jewelry with 100% pure gold composition, and as an alternative, you only need to use cheaper metals covered with gold coatings.
Benefits of Gold-Plated Jewelries
Gold plating can give you many benefits. First, gold plating can save you a lot of money when buying gold-related products, such as jewelry. You don’t need to pay for the full price of 100% gold composition for the jewelry if you just want to wear it for appearance. Second, gold plating can also keep yourself looking fashionable with the jewelry you are wearing. From the outside, gold-plated jewelries have minor differences when compared to the 100% pure gold jewelries.
The third benefit is that you can pick which metal composition you would like to use with the gold-plated jewelries. Thus, you can make the gold-plated jewelries much more durable than pure gold when you include durable materials in the metal composition.
Disadvantages of Gold-Plated Jewelries
Gold-plated jewelry has some disadvantages that can turn people off from wearing them. For instance, because it only has a minimal amount of gold in its composition, most people will consider gold-plated jewelries to be the imitation or replica of the regular gold jewelries. Also, gold-plated jewelries often have little value when you sell them. The reason is that the price is already cheap enough for anyone to buy it, so it might be difficult for you to sell them for a higher value. Also, the amount of gold included in the item composition is quite small, making the gold-plated jewelry undesirable for those who are looking for gold-based products.
The gold-plated jewelries also have only the thin layer of gold coating the surface, which is prone to scratches. Wearing the gold-plated jewelry item every day will often make it easier for the coating surface to get scratched and damaged. The more scratches the jewelry has, the lower the value for it will be.
Also, you will often deal with the tarnishing problems of the gold-plated jewelry, where the base material will become apparent when you keep wearing it. For instance, if you wear the gold-plated jewelry item with copper as its base material, the copper material will appear on the surface of the jewelry item over time, tarnishing the gold coating on it.
Conclusion
You have learned about what does gold plated mean. It means putting the gold coatings on the surface of jewelry and other metal items. The gold coatings on the surface of these metal items are often very thin, making it easy for the coatings to wear off from time to time. When it happens, the metal items will no longer have any gold appearance nor any economic value.
