All about gold filled

what is gold filled?

Gold filled is a material with a thick layer of 12 or 14kt gold fused onto a brass core. This layer will not chip and will often take anywhere between several months to a lifetime to wear off, depending on the weight of the item. It will last a lot longer than regular gold plated jewellery!

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Production Process

The layer of gold is mechanically fused onto a brass core with pressure and heat. Sort of a laminate. By law the amount of gold is 5% of the total weight of the item. This layer will not chip and will often take anywhere between several months to a lifetime to wear off. In comparison: most gold plated items have less than 0.01% of gold and might wear off in a matter of weeks.

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Life Expectancy

This means that most of our rings can be worn daily and last for many years (even with regular hand washing). Necklaces will wear quicker, because of the fineness of the material, but you should expect our thinnest necklaces to last anywhere between 6 months to a few years.
This will depend much on how you treat it and, not fair at all, the acidity of your skin.

Please be aware though that a lot of our finer necklaces and bracelets have delicate chain and should still be treated accordingly. Not showering or swimming with your finer jewelry will elongate it's life.

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Jewelry Care

We advise not to polish your gold filled items. They usually don't need it and it would make the gold layer wear off quicker.

When eventually the gold layer does wear off, the brass core underneath is slowly revealed. Once all the gold has worn off, you can polish the item and keep wearing it! Rings can most likely still go without polishing, necklaces will retrieve some of that golden shine after polishing.

A Note About Warranty

Warranty on our jewelry always extends to production faults, whether because of our assembly or in manufacture of the materials.

If the jewelry has been worn for a reasonable amount of time, wear and tear might become visible and jewelry might even break. On our fine chains this will be much sooner than on our chunkier rings (see the part about Life Expectancy above). This does not fall under our warranty, but under the customers responsibility to care for their jewelry appropriately.

Please keep in mind, that even with the right care, jewelry will still wear over time.

We can however often repair or replace parts of your item at a reasonable cost.

In case you are not interested in repairs or partial replacements, you can donate your piece for recycling and receive 10% off a new item.

sensitivities

99% of sensitive people react well, or better said not at all to gold filled jewelry. Because the layer of gold is so much thicker than with gold plated items, wearing gold filled feels like full gold to the skin.
However: the finer the material, the thinner the layer of gold. The links of a necklace are hundreds of times thinner than an earring or a ring and will expose the brass underneath sooner.

This might mean that a super sensitive person could react to a chain earring or a necklace, but maybe not at all to a ring. A matter of trial and error, but you might think it's worth finding out for economic reasons: a fraction of gold means a fraction of the price of full gold.

Another skin matter is acidity. A small percentage of people have skin with a relatively high acidity, which unfortunately means that metals (including gold and gold filled) could change color. This too will mostly be with the finer items; ear chains and necklaces. Discoloration will probably show at the soldered spots first. At the clasp of a necklace, or the part of an ear chain that is sitting in the earlobe.

why is not everyone using it?

Probably because of it's limitations. It is hard to solder and will take a lot of time and skill to be done in a way that not too much discoloration will show at the soldering seam. Besides, because of the soldering seam the piece should be gold plated after, so that the seam will have the same color as the item...doesn't make much sense.

That means if you want to work with gold filled you are stuck with the beads and parts available at the supplier (which are all laser-soldered with specialized machines and therefore leave much less of a nasty seam). In that sense I'm so grateful that all these minimalist jewelry brands popped up in the last decade. It made the variety in small parts and charms sooo much better!

It's been a really nice challenge from the start to work around the soldering issue and find ways to connect parts. We use a little 8 shaped connection in most of our necklaces and bracelets, for instance to connect the clasp with the chain. Another good example is our wire ring. No soldering but coiling and crimping to fasten the bead in place.

By far the biggest issue with gold filled is that you can not make casts like you can in full gold or silver. So designing your own charms and pendants is not possible in this material. So we work with what we can find ready-made and be as creative as possible to assemble something that is worthy to be on your precious skin!

Is gold filled considered "sustainable"?

Most of our gold filled materials and parts are manufactured in the USA, therefore adhering to American laws for environment and production processes. No child-labor and unfair working conditions, we may assume.

Our two biggest suppliers of materials and parts use mostly (85-99%) recycled gold for the manufacturing of their parts, chain, wire etc. And both of them are completely solar powered and have been working on reducing their impact on the environment for many years.

Looking at the life span of gold filled jewelry we can definitely see an advantage over regular gold plated jewelry, in durability and longevity. As mentioned above, our sturdier pieces like our rings and earrings, can last for many years.

But in the end it depends on how you look at sustainability yourself. If you feel sustainability is about longevity and durability, then sure, gold filled could be considered a sustainable material.

To me however, sustainability is about a closed loop, no waste, 100% re-use of materials, no new plastics... in the whole production process and throughout the whole company... We are doing our best and are always looking for improvements, but as a company we are not there...yet.