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20 results for “karat vs fineness”
Craft · 22 July 2026
Hallmarks and Assay: How Anyone Proves Gold Is Gold
…terpiece of institutional design — and it is being quietly eroded. · A hallmark certifies fineness verified by an independent third party — not weight, value, age or craftsmanship. · Fire assay remains the referee method; XRF is fast and non-destructive but reads only the surface…
Yusuf Demir · 12 min read
Craft · 3 August 2026
The Wedding-Season Bid: How Jewellery Demand Sets the Floor
…y is roughly half of annual gold demand, and the majority of it is bought in Asia. · High-karat jewellery in India and China functions as savings with a wearable form factor, not as fashion. · Physical buyers are contrarian: demand strengthens on price weakness and stalls on rall…
Yusuf Demir · 16 min read
Science · 9 August 2026
The Metallurgy of Karat
…u own that is gold is a designed alloy — and the design is where 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…
Tomas Herrera · 16 min read
Craft · 5 June 2026
The Alchemy of Craft: What Goldsmiths Know That Machines Don't
…· Pure gold is too soft for most 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 h…
Yusuf Demir · 11 min read
Markets · 8 August 2026
Moving Bullion: The Logistics Nobody Prices
…· The London market clears in 400-ounce bars of variable weight, refined to a minimum 995 fineness. Comex futures deliver against 100-ounce bars and kilobars. Most Asian markets, and the retail demand behind them, want kilobars at 9999 fineness. These are not interchangeable obje…
Ingrid Sørensen · 17 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
Industry · 6 August 2026
The Scrap Trade
…ds to price faster than mine output can. · Scrap is priced off spot, adjusted for assayed fineness, then discounted for testing, refining, transport and each intermediary's margin. · High-street payouts commonly land well below spot for the contained gold; specialist refiners buy…
Ingrid Sørensen · 15 min read
Industry · 7 August 2026
How Fake Gold Is Detected
…gold. XRF is excellent for detecting alloy fraud in jewellery and for confirming surface fineness; it is structurally incapable of seeing a core. · What does ultrasonic testing actually measure? The speed of sound through the object. Longitudinal velocity in gold is roughly 3,24…
Tomas Herrera · 15 min read
Industry · 2 July 2026
Nine Nines: Inside a Modern Gold Refinery
…le market. · Provenance documentation now determines a bar's marketability as much as its fineness. · What is a doré bar? A doré bar is the semi-pure alloy poured at a mine site, typically 70–90 per cent gold with silver and base-metal impurities. It is the standard form in which…
Tomas Herrera · 12 min read
Markets · 20 June 2026
Bring It Home: Central Banks and the Great Gold Repatriation
…able to routine in about a decade. · ~12.4 kg Weight of a Good Delivery bar 995.0 Minimum fineness for Good Delivery 400 oz Nominal bar size, wholesale market Nobody's liability Gold's defining reserve property · The costs nobody advertises · Repatriation is not free, and the bil…
Ingrid Sørensen · 13 min read
Markets · 6 August 2026
Why Central Banks Started Buying Gold Again
…t the metal moving. Refining and upgrading — converting existing holdings of older, lower-fineness bars into current Good Delivery specification so they are tradeable without assay disputes. · Why the reported numbers lag Official reserve statistics are self-reported, published w…
Ingrid Sørensen · 17 min read
Industry · 7 August 2026
After the Cyanide
Every ounce of mined gold leaves behind roughly a tonne of processed rock and the water that carried it. What happens to that material after the last shift is the part of the industry with the longest…
Tomas Herrera · 17 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 · 14 July 2026
The Gold Standard: How a Soft Yellow Metal Became Money
For roughly five thousand years, humanity kept returning to the same element to settle its debts. The story is less about greed than about the unusually boring chemistry of atomic number 79. · Gold's…
Marguerite Adler · 14 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
Science · 8 August 2026
The Metal That Went Medical
Divide gold finely enough and it stops being gold-coloured, stops being inert in the way you expect, and starts doing work in places no bullion bar could reach — including the test strip that told you…
Amara Okonjo · 15 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
