The Different Types of Gold: Color, Karat and Construction Explained

"Types of gold" has three different answers, and which one you want depends on what you're actually trying to decide. It can mean the color, the purity, or how the gold is attached to the thing you're buying. Three colors, six karat grades, four constructions.

Most guides pick one of those three and never mention the other two, which is why this question feels harder to answer than it should be. Below we'll take all three in order, then say plainly how many types there are depending on what you meant. 

Jump to:

• The Three Ways to Answer This
• Types of Gold by Color
• Types of Gold by Karat
• Types of Gold by Construction
• So How Many Types of Gold Are There?
• How to Tell What You've Actually Got
• Which One Should You Actually Buy?
• What We Make
• FAQs

The Three Ways to Answer This

All gold starts as the same element. Every difference between one piece and another comes from one of three decisions somebody made.

What it's mixed with decides the color. Pure gold is yellow, and every other color is an alloy doing something to it.

How much of it is gold decides the karat. This is the number stamped on the clasp, and it's the one that moves the price.

Whether it's gold all the way through decides the construction. This is the one people skip, and it's the one that decides whether a piece lasts a decade or a season.

A 14K yellow gold plated chain and an 18K rose gold solid chain differ on all three axes at once. Knowing which axis someone is talking about is most of what it takes to read a listing properly.

Types of Gold by Color

Three in common use, and they are the same gold with different company.

Yellow gold

Gold alloyed with copper and silver, in roughly equal measure. This is the one that looks like what gold is, because it's closest to the metal in its pure state. It's also the most forgiving on warm and deep skin tones, and the oldest continuous tradition in men's jewelry.

White gold

Gold alloyed with pale metals, usually palladium, nickel or silver, then almost always finished in rhodium to give it the bright white surface people expect. That rhodium finish is the part worth knowing about: it's a coating, it wears, and underneath it white gold is faintly warm rather than truly white. A jeweler can re-plate it, and periodically they will need to.

Rose gold

Gold with a higher proportion of copper than yellow gold carries. More copper means redder, which is why rose, pink and red gold are the same idea at different strengths. It contains exactly as much gold as yellow gold at the same karat, which surprises people who assume it's a cheaper option.

The rarer ones

Green gold is a gold and silver alloy, and it occurs naturally as electrum. Purple and black gold exist but are intermetallic compounds or surface treatments rather than workable alloys, which is why you almost never see them outside novelty pieces. If a listing offers black gold at an ordinary price, it's a coating.

One thing that holds across all of them: color tells you nothing about quality. A 9K yellow and a 22K yellow are both yellow. If you're weighing the two most commonly confused, rose gold against white gold goes into the comparison properly.

Types of Gold by Karat

Karat measures how much of the alloy is actually gold, in twenty-fourths. 24 parts out of 24 is pure; 18 out of 24 is 75%.

Note the spelling, because it trips people up: in the United States karat is gold purity and carat is gemstone weight. Britain uses carat for both, which is why you'll see 18ct on British listings and 18K on American ones for the same thing.

A misconception worth correcting here. There is no minimum karat in US law below which something stops being gold. The FTC's rule is about disclosure rather than a floor: if a piece isn't pure gold, the karat fineness has to be stated, conspicuously, right before the word gold. 9 karat appears in the FTC's own examples. So 9K is genuinely gold. It's just 37.5% of it.

The tolerance is tight, incidentally. Under the National Stamping Act a marked fineness can be off by three parts per thousand, or seven where there's solder involved, which works out at a fraction of a karat. A stamp is a real commitment, not a rounding.

Our guide to the symbols stamped on jewelry covers how to read the rest of the marks you'll find next to it.

Types of Gold by Construction

This is the axis most guides leave out, and it's the one that decides whether you're happy in five years.

Two chains can both say 18K and be nothing alike, because one is 18K throughout and the other is 18K for the first fraction of a micron. The karat describes the gold. It says nothing about how much of it there is.

Read the right-hand column again on the last two rows. A piece can legally be sold to you as gold plated with a layer 0.175 microns thick, which is about seven millionths of an inch, and it will wear through at the clasp in weeks. Clearing that bar proves almost nothing, which is exactly why the phrase is so unhelpful on its own. We've gone through that in full in what gold plated actually means.

The two questions that settle it: how thick, and what's underneath. Gold over stainless steel behaves completely differently from the same gold over brass, because steel doesn't corrode and brass does. 18k gold and gold vermeil covers the precious-base route, and how long gold plating lasts covers what to expect from a well-made plated piece.

So How Many Types of Gold Are There?

A direct answer, since it's the thing people actually type.

Three, if you mean colors: yellow, white and rose. This is what almost everybody means when they say three.

Six, if you mean karat grades in ordinary use: 9K, 10K, 14K, 18K, 22K and 24K.

Four, if you mean constructions: solid, vermeil, gold filled and gold plated. Five if you count gold tone, which contains no gold and arguably shouldn't be on the list at all.

Multiply them out and you get a few dozen combinations that genuinely exist and behave differently. Which is why the question has no single number attached to it, and why anybody who gives you one without asking what you meant hasn't understood it.

How to Tell What You've Actually Got

If you already own the piece and the listing is long gone, four checks get you most of the way.

Read the stamp first. A karat number on its own, like 14K or 585, means solid gold at that fineness. A karat number sitting next to letters changes the meaning entirely: GP is gold plated, GEP is gold electroplate, HGE is heavy gold electroplate, and GF is gold filled. So 18K and 18K GP are not variations of the same thing, they're opposite ends of the range. Numbers rather than karats are the European convention: 585 is 14K, 750 is 18K, 375 is 9K.

Then pick it up. Gold is dense, noticeably more so than brass or steel, and solid gold has a heft that surprises people the first time. A chain that looks substantial and weighs almost nothing is telling you what's underneath the finish.

Then try a magnet. Gold isn't magnetic, and neither is sterling silver. A piece that pulls toward a magnet has a meaningful amount of ferromagnetic metal in it somewhere, which on a gold-colored piece usually means a steel or nickel-bearing core under the plating. It won't tell you a piece is solid gold, but it will tell you when one isn't.

Then look at the wear points. Clasps, edges, the underside of a ring, anywhere that takes constant contact. On solid gold those areas polish and stay the same color. On a plated piece they eventually go pale or pink as the base metal comes through, and that's the most reliable tell there is, because it's the one thing a finish can't fake over time.

What none of these prove on their own is purity. A stamp is a claim, and in the US it's a claim backed by the National Stamping Act with real penalties behind it, but only a jeweler with an acid test or an XRF scanner can confirm the number. For anything you're spending real money on, that's worth the appointment.

Which One Should You Actually Buy?

Take the three axes in reverse order, because that's the order they matter in.

Construction first. It's the biggest decision by a distance and the one that decides how the piece ages. Solid gold if you want the metal to hold its value. Gold over a stainless steel core if you want the look at a price you'd actually pay, and you want it to last. Gold over brass if you want it for a season and you know that's what you're buying.

Karat second. If you're buying solid, 18K is the sensible default and 14K is the harder-wearing one. If you're buying plated, the karat describes a layer, so it matters far less than the thickness does.

Color last. It's the decision people agonize over and the one that changes least. Pick the one you keep looking at. Our guide to silver or gold goes into why skin tone decides far less than everybody claims.

Two other things worth knowing before you spend. Plated and solid gold look identical across a room, so most of what reads as expensive is weight and setting rather than metal. And if you want to understand what gold is actually worth by mass, how much a gold bar is worth works it out from scratch.

What We Make

Worth stating plainly, since this whole page is about how much the description leaves out.

Our gold pieces are real 18 karat gold over a solid 316L stainless steel core, with a layer of rhodium between the two rather than the nickel much of the industry uses as a barrier. Steel doesn't rust, corrode or tarnish, so there's no reactive metal waiting underneath, and no copper to mark skin if the finish ever thins.

We also make gold vermeil, which is 18 karat gold over solid sterling silver to the 2.5 micron standard, for anyone who wants a precious metal underneath rather than steel.

Neither is solid gold and we don't describe them as such. Both give you a real answer to the two questions this page says to ask, which is more than the word gold does on its own. The full range sits in men's gold jewelry, and types of men's chains covers which style to put it on.

FAQs

How many types of gold are there?

It depends which question you're asking. Three colors are in common use: yellow, white and rose. Six karat grades cover almost everything sold: 9K, 10K, 14K, 18K, 22K and 24K. And four constructions: solid, vermeil, gold filled and gold plated. So the honest answer is three, six or four, and most arguments about it are two people answering different questions.

What are the 3 types of gold?

If someone says three, they almost always mean the colors: yellow, white and rose. All three start as the same gold and differ only in what's alloyed with it. Yellow uses copper and silver, white uses pale metals like palladium, and rose uses more copper than yellow does.

What is the best type of gold?

18K in a color you like, if you're buying solid. It's rich enough to read as gold and alloyed enough to survive being worn. 14K is harder and paler, 22K and 24K are too soft for most jewelry, and below 14K the color starts to go.

Is 9K or 10K gold real gold?

Yes. 9K is 37.5% gold and 10K is 41.7%, and both are legally gold in the US as long as the karat is marked. The FTC doesn't set a minimum karat, it requires the fineness to be stated. What changes at the low end is the color and how much gold you're actually buying.

What's the difference between white gold and silver?

They're different metals that happen to look similar. White gold is gold alloyed with pale metals and usually finished in rhodium. Silver is its own element, sold as sterling at 92.5% purity. White gold costs considerably more and doesn't tarnish the way sterling does.

Is rose gold real gold?

Yes. Rose gold is the same gold with a higher proportion of copper in the alloy, which is where the color comes from. An 18K rose gold piece contains exactly as much gold as an 18K yellow gold one.

What's the difference between gold plated and gold filled?

Thickness and method. Plating bonds a thin layer electrically, with a US legal floor of 0.175 microns. Gold filled bonds a much thicker layer mechanically, and at least a twentieth of the item's weight has to be gold. Gold filled lasts considerably longer.

Does the type of gold change how much it's worth?

Karat does, directly and proportionally. An 18K piece holds roughly twice the gold of a 9K piece of the same weight. Color doesn't, since rose and yellow at the same karat contain the same gold. And construction matters most of all, because a plated piece contains a fraction of a gram whatever karat the surface says.

Where to Go From Here

Color, karat, construction. Settle which one you're actually asking about and the answer stops being complicated, and the one that decides most is the one nobody leads with.

Have a look through the gold range if you're deciding what to buy, or what gold plated means if you want the construction question in full.