White Gold Lockets

Lockets are perennial favorites. They are often the most treasured pieces of jewelry in a woman's collection. Lockets represent not only beauty, but the beauty of relationships. The pictures contained in lockets allow the wearer to carry her loved ones with her no matter where she goes. White gold lockets offer a subtle and elegant alternative to more traditional yellow gold options.

Gold and copper are the only two naturally occurring metals that have any real color in them. All of the other metals that occur in nature are white or gray. Fortunately for jewelry enthusiasts, someone came up with the bright idea of blending the metals together to form different shades of the metals.

Whenever two or more pure metals are blended together, the resultant mixture is referred to as an alloy. By its sheer definition, all gold jewelry is actually gold alloy jewelry. Pure gold has a distinctive orange-yellow hue, however in its pure form, gold is way too soft to use as jewelry.

Thus, before a person can purchase any piece of jewelry made out the traditional yellow gold that we are all used to seeing, it must first be mixed with copper and silver to give it a little durability. All other shades of gold must go through a similar process. Of course, in the case of white gold, it is crafted to resemble another metal.

The Old World Feel of White Gold

The metal that white gold is supposed to look like is platinum, which was very popular in the early 1900s. Unfortunately it was severely rationed during World War II, and white gold was created to replace it. For this very reason, any jewelry produced out of white gold, (i.e., white gold lockets) has an old-world or antique like feel to it.