White gold is an alloy of gold and at least one white metal – sometimes more than one. Those additional metals could be nickel, silver, palladium, and/or zinc. Sometimes a little copper is added too, to make the alloy less brittle and easier to shape. But only a little copper can be added, because if you add too much of it to gold, the resulting alloy becomes pinkish in hue. (That’s where so-called pink gold comes from.)

Today is an especially good time to make money by refining older pieces of jewelry that were crafted in white gold.

Why? Here’s a bit of history that could come in handy if you are interested in making money by reclaiming and recycling gold scrap . . .

Gold is a yellow metal, right? So how does it get turned into white gold?

That is a common question about white gold. We’ll answer it in today’s post, along with some others.

White gold is an alloy of gold and at least one white metal – sometimes more than one. Those additional metals could be nickel, palladium, or zinc. Sometimes a little copper is added too, to make the alloy less brittle and easier to shape. But only a little copper can be added, because if you add too much of it to gold, the resulting alloy becomes pinkish in hue. (That’s where so-called pink gold comes from.)

We’ve already written about pink gold, rose gold, white gold, and even green gold on the Specialty Metals blog. (See related posts below.) We thought we’d seen just about every color, then we found an article entitled “What Can Make a Piece of Gold Turn Blue?” that Esther Inglis-Arkell wrote for io9.com. 

If you go shopping at antique malls or estate sales, you will discover a number of items for sale that are made of gray metal. How can you tell if they are made of silver, white gold or platinum?