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Science · 9 August 2026

The Metallurgy of Karat

…e the engineering lives. · Karat is a fraction, not a quality grade: 24 parts by mass, so 18k is 75.0% gold and 9k is 37.5%. · Pure gold measures roughly 25 HV on the Vickers scale — softer than a fingernail can dent — which is why it is alloyed before it is worked. · Colour is s…

Tomas Herrera · 16 min read

Craft · 22 July 2026

Hallmarks and Assay: How Anyone Proves Gold Is Gold

…reads only the surface. · Karat and fineness describe the same thing on different scales: 18ct is 750 parts per thousand gold. · Plating, filling and surface enrichment are the failure modes that surface-reading instruments miss. · Hallmarking regimes differ sharply by country, s…

Yusuf Demir · 12 min read

Craft · 3 August 2026

The Wedding-Season Bid: How Jewellery Demand Sets the Floor

…retaining enough alloy for the metal to survive being worn. Western markets favour 14 and 18 karat, which are harder and cheaper but hold far less metal. · What are making charges? The fabrication cost a jeweller adds to the metal value: labour, wastage during working, design and…

Yusuf Demir · 16 min read

Mining · 5 August 2026

Grade, Cut-off and the Arithmetic of an Open Pit

A gold mine is not a hole with gold in it. It is a spreadsheet with a hole attached — and the single number that decides which rock is ore and which rock is waste moves every time the price does. · Mo…

Amara Okonjo · 16 min read

Markets · 8 August 2026

Moving Bullion: The Logistics Nobody Prices

Between the vault and the buyer sits an industry of armoured vehicles, sealed cargo, bonded warehouses and insurance clauses. It rarely makes news, and it is the reason a spot price in London can dive…

Ingrid Sørensen · 17 min read

Craft · 5 June 2026

The Alchemy of Craft: What Goldsmiths Know That Machines Don't

…t wear; alloying trades purity for hardness and colour. · Karat is a fraction out of 24 — 18k is 75 per cent gold by mass. · Ancient techniques such as granulation and repoussé remain hand skills with no full machine equivalent. · CAD and casting have displaced volume production,…

Yusuf Demir · 11 min read

Industry · 7 August 2026

How Fake Gold Is Detected

…st takes under a minute and costs a fraction of an assay. · 19.32 / 19.25 Density of gold vs tungsten (g/cm³) 3,240 / 5,180 Sound velocity, gold vs tungsten (m/s) ~30 µm Practical XRF sampling depth in gold ±0.01 mm Dimensional tolerance a modern mint holds · Coins are a differen…

Tomas Herrera · 15 min read

Industry · 6 August 2026

The Scrap Trade

…ld? Work out the contained gold first: weight in grams multiplied by fineness — 0.750 for 18k, 0.585 for 14k, 0.375 for 9k — multiplied by the spot price per gram. That is the theoretical maximum. What you are offered is a percentage of it, and the percentage varies enormously be…

Ingrid Sørensen · 15 min read

Industry · 2 July 2026

Nine Nines: Inside a Modern Gold Refinery

…mid sparks · Stage one: the Miller process · Francis Bowyer Miller patented his method in 1867, and it is still how most of the world's gold takes its first serious step towards purity. Molten doré is held at around 1,100°C and chlorine gas is bubbled through it via a ceramic lan…

Tomas Herrera · 12 min read

History · 14 July 2026

The Gold Standard: How a Soft Yellow Metal Became Money

…ss, divisibility, density and scarcity — not on decree. · The classical gold standard (c. 1870–1914) was a short, unusually globalised episode, not humanity's default state. · Bretton Woods made gold a wholesale settlement asset between states rather than a coin in a pocket. · Th…

Marguerite Adler · 14 min read

Science · 8 August 2026

The Metal That Went Medical

…o discovered colloidal gold? Michael Faraday prepared and studied stable gold colloids in 1857, correctly concluding that the ruby colour arose from finely divided metal rather than a dissolved compound. Some of his original preparations are still in the Royal Institution's colle…

Amara Okonjo · 15 min read

Industry · 7 August 2026

After the Cyanide

…roblem one: the reagent · Cyanide leaching has been the industry's core process since the 1890s, and its persistence is a matter of arithmetic rather than affection. Gold is chemically stubborn; very few reagents will dissolve it at all, and fewer still will do so without also di…

Tomas Herrera · 17 min read

Markets · 20 June 2026

Bring It Home: Central Banks and the Great Gold Repatriation

For half a century it was rational to store your gold in someone else's basement. Then the calculus of counterparty risk changed, and reserve managers started chartering aircraft. · Overseas custody w…

Ingrid Sørensen · 13 min read

Industry · 4 August 2026

The Gold Inside Your Phone

Industrial demand is the quietest third of the gold market: a few tenths of a gram per handset, multiplied by billions of devices, chosen not for prestige but because nothing else conducts as reliably…

Tomas Herrera · 15 min read

History · 9 August 2026

The Hoard Problem: What Buried Gold Actually Tells Us

A field of gold torcs and coins is a spectacular find and a treacherous document. The people who buried it were not writing to us, and the reasons they had for putting it in the ground are exactly wha…

Marguerite Adler · 16 min read

Mining · 22 May 2026

The Other Supply Chain: Artisanal Mining and the Mercury Problem

A significant share of the world's gold is produced by people working with hand tools, informal finance and a neurotoxin. Formalisation is the stated solution. Nobody agrees on what it costs. · Artisa…

Amara Okonjo · 12 min read

Industry · 28 July 2026

Urban Mining: The Richest Gold Ore on Earth Is in Your Old Phone

A tonne of good underground ore holds a few grams of gold. A tonne of discarded circuit boards can hold two hundred. So why is most of it still going into landfill? · Concentration, not tonnage, is wh…

Tomas Herrera · 13 min read

Science · 10 August 2026

Where Gold Actually Comes From

Every gram of gold on Earth was manufactured in an astrophysical catastrophe, arrived here after the planet had already formed, and was then concentrated by hot water. Three separate accidents, none o…

Tomas Herrera · 18 min read

Markets · 2 August 2026

Who Actually Sets the Gold Price

There is no single gold price. There is a London settlement number, a New York futures curve, a Shanghai premium and a jeweller's counter in Dubai — and the distance between them is where the market l…

Ingrid Sørensen · 15 min read

Markets · 6 August 2026

Why Central Banks Started Buying Gold Again

For three decades official institutions were net sellers of bullion, and the policy consensus treated the metal as a museum piece. Then, quietly, the world's reserve managers reversed. The reasons are…

Ingrid Sørensen · 17 min read

Policies · 6 August 2026

Editorial Standards & Corrections

…be unwilling to defend, and we do not use question marks to imply what we cannot state. · 18. Accessibility and plain language · This publication is written for a reader with no background in monetary economics, metallurgy or mine finance. Technical terms are defined at first use…