About Platinum

Beauty

The popularity of platinum is due to its distinctive appearance, its matchless white lustre. It also remains the strongest and heaviest precious metal used in making ornaments – it is twice as heavy as 14 karat gold. 
The demand for as the metal of choice for diamond engagement rings has seen a meteoric rise in the recent past. The reason is not hard to find – its inimitable sheen brings out the brilliance of diamonds like nothing else on earth.

History

Like gold, platinum is a metal with a long and illustrious past. It was a great favorite in ancient Egypt. Indigenous craftsmen in South and Central America used it as early as 100 B.C. The limitations of early forging and casting techniques must have made it quite a difficult metal to work with. After all, platinum is very hard and has a very high melting point. However, unlike its yellow cousin whose popularity has remained uniform over the years, platinum has seen a fabulous rise in demand in the last two centuries. Today it is far more precious than gold.

Origin

For centuries, the only large amounts of platinum outside of South America were found in Russian mines. Today despite its growing demand platinum remains one of the rarest metals to be found on earth. It is extremely difficult to extract and refine. Ten tons of ore need to be mined to extract a single ounce of platinum, and it takes a full five months to refine it to ornament grade.
Platinum in jewelry is actually an alloy of five other heavy metals, including palladium, rhodium, ruthenium, iridium and osmium, with platinum. However, these metals are quite similar to platinum in weight and chemistry. Most of them were not even distinguished from each other until early in the nineteenth century!

Please Click Here to Continue onto Pearls.