Every Jewellery Metal Ranked (Some Are Terrible)

I don't know Mason Mignanelli from Adam, but he clearly knows more about working with metals for jewelry than I do.

As an aside, sources seem to say that jewelry (as my browser wants me to spell the word) and jewellery (as Mason spells it in his video title) are both correct, but that the shorter spelling is more prevalent in the US (where I am) and the longer is more prevalent in the UK (where I assume Mason is).

As a warning, the video does have a couple of spicy words at 1:30 (s*** - spoken), 1:40 (s*** - spoken), 5:55 (s*** - spoken), 6:30 (s*** - spoken), and 7:20 (kicka** - shown on screen).

tl;dr - no one metal is perfect. They all involve tradeoffs or workability/hardness, cost, and appearance. 

All the Discovered Gold in the World (in one chart)

Source - Visual Capitalist

The source of this graphic - Kalo Gold - appears to be a gold speculation company focusing on Fiji and British Columbia. I haven't the foggiest idea whether they're a reputable company or some sort of scammers' paradise.

I do know that I like their inforgraphic on where the gold in the world currently is - both above and underground.

Long term, I wonder when it'll become profitable to mine for gold in our landfills - especially the last few years' layers including electronic equipment.

Can you GROW an Opal?

Opals are pretty.

Full stop

And they are incredibly rare and labor intensive to mine.

So why not just make them at home?

All it takes is seven or so months, a fume hood, some ethyl alcohol (purer is better), tetraethyl orthosilicate, ammonium hydroxide, a stirrer, water bath, hot plate, resin, a vacuum chamber, and apparently infinite patience.

I looked into buying them, and even the synthetic ones aren't terribly cheap.

Facinating metal rings change multiple colours.

Edit: I had hunted down a YouTube upload of the Reddit video I'm about to describe, but that upload disappeared before this post even appeared, so I'm just linking to the Reddit original. I do warn you that the title of the subreddit contains a nsfw word. It's titled blackmagicf***ery. You have been warned. The above video is less thrilling and contains some pretty annoying music though it does show the same concept of titanium anodization.

I originally found it on one of Reddit's unfortunately-named subreddits. That link is here, but I'll avoid embedding from the Reddit source so the inappropriate subreddit title won't show up here. You have been warned.

It is exactly the same video, however the reddit version is in slightly higher resolution.

Not much to say here other than that this is a bit of a teaser for a video I'm posting later this week that explains how anodizing works...

...and the new fad deadly among teenagers that you need to know.

Annealing Metal

Yeah, but how do you get the bracelet to be the right shape and size?

Do you actually wrap the cooled, annealed metal around your wrist, or is there some sort of mandrill that you use as an arm stand-in?

And how do you get the pretty, peened appearance on the surface of the bracelet?

I have so many questions - because I pretty much understand that annealing the metal makes it more workable (while admittedly, developing some pretty nasty scale).

Color: a spectrum of possibilities for your ring

I desperately want a titanium ring, and I'm really curious to get one that's anodized in some gorgeous color(s).

I just can't figure out which ring I want. There are tons of choices.

The titanium, then, can be oxidized to produce gorgeous colors. The process of creating an oxide coating on a metal via application of electrical current is called anodizing.

One of these years I'll get around to trying to do some anodizing myself, but I'm going to have to get a steady supply of titanium before I can use it as a class lab. Titanium's kinda expensive and really, really hard to cut - something that I need to consider, too.

When I do get around to it, though, I'll check back on these instruction pages.

As a warning, there isn't really any color to the oxide layer. It's caused by light wave interference. Check the science out if you really want to know.

If you were thinking of a gift for your favorite material science blogger, I'll need to measure my ring size first, but this one's the current choice.