How To Care For Electro-Plated Metals

Hi, I'm Cherie Birks from Cool Diamonds in London, Hatton Garden, and I'm a goldsmith here and I've been a goldsmith for nearly 10 years and I trained for that in Australia. But apparently, we sell diamonds mounted in platinum, 18-karat white gold and 18-karat yellow gold. I'm here to demonstrate polishing and resizing of rings and diamond jewellery.

So, I'm here to talk about electroplating. We cover the rhodium plating of white gold. Most white gold rings which you will buy will have been rhodium plated.

Rhodium is an actual metal on its own, it's very rare, it's very expensive, it's also very hard and it gives a really really nice high white shine. As you can see the two, like this before and after, so the ring on the right is un-rhodium plated. That's how a ring will start.

The reason that we rhodium plate it is to make it look better and because naturally, 18-karat white gold is not as perfect white as we would like it to be, and so we rhodium plate it. Rhodium plating is done with a process called electroplating whereby currents are run through solutions where rhodium particles are suspended in an acid and when the current is run through, the metal is dipped into the solution and the rhodium particles then stick to the item that you want to rhodium plate. This process is done, it's just electroplating.

It covers a lot of things like gold plating, silver plating, cover plating, all sorts of different types of plating are done using this method. It just depends on the solution and the particles of whatever metal you want to plate with that is suspended in that solution. The current is usually just a couple of nanometres thick so with white gold, we do recommend that you get it rhodium plated, say, once a year also and it will renew your ring.