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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 · 17 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 · 15 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 · 15 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 · 16 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

Industry · 7 August 2026

How Fake Gold Is Detected

…tungsten-cored bar is a rare, deliberate, high-value fraud; a batch of jewellery stamped 18-karat that actually assays at 15 or 16 is quiet, distributed across thousands of pieces, and usually only discovered when the item is later sold and independently assayed. · Does hallmark…

Tomas Herrera · 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 · 20 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 · 15 min read

Markets · 17 August 2026

Paper Gold: What You Own When You Do Not Own Bars

Most of the world's gold exposure is a contract, not a metal. Futures, unallocated accounts and exchange-traded funds each promise gold in a different way — and the differences only become visible whe…

Ingrid Sørensen · 23 min read

Industry · 2 July 2026

Nine Nines: Inside a Modern Gold Refinery

…ce work before it ever reaches the furnace. · The metallurgy has barely changed since the 1870s; what has changed is the containment engineering, financial controls and paperwork built around it. · What is a doré bar? A doré bar is the semi-pure alloy poured at a mine site, typic…

Tomas Herrera · 19 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 · 16 min read

Markets · 18 August 2026

The Vault Beneath the City

…stodial concern. · Venezuela's gold, held at the Bank of England, has been frozen since 2018 amid a dispute over who legitimately represents the country's government. · Physical audits of national gold reserves are rarer than markets assume; full independent bar-by-bar verificati…

Ingrid Sørensen · 22 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 · 19 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 · 16 min read

Industry · 20 August 2026

The Refiner's Ledger

…according to how pure the final product needs to be. The Miller process, developed in the 1860s and still in wide industrial use, bubbles chlorine gas through the molten doré; base metals react with the chlorine and are drawn off as chlorides, leaving behind gold at roughly 995 p…

Tomas Herrera · 17 min read

Industry · 28 July 2026

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

…evices, per kilogram Lower Typical life-cycle emissions per gram, formal e-waste recovery vs primary mining Reversed That comparison's direction once informal, unpermitted recovery is substituted

Tomas Herrera · 16 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 · 14 min read

Mining · 19 August 2026

Nine Grams a Tonne

What does it actually cost to pull an ounce of gold out of the ground? The honest answer runs through grade decline, energy and water bills, permitting delays and the closure liabilities nobody prices…

Amara Okonjo · 18 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 · 18 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

Markets · 11 September 2026

The Last Audit: What We Actually Know About the World's Official Gold

Governments report holding roughly 36,000 tonnes of gold — a figure quoted everywhere and verified almost nowhere. Between the published number and the physical bar sits a chain of certificates, custo…

Ingrid Sørensen · 22 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 · 15 min read

Markets · 8 September 2026

The Real-Rate Trade: Why Gold Moves When Bond Yields Do

For two decades the gold price could be read off an inflation-linked bond screen. Then, somewhere after 2022, the relationship stopped behaving — and the argument about why has become the most consequ…

Ingrid Sørensen · 25 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 · 17 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 · 16 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 · 14 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…