Why you should always wear precious metals?
I’m going to change something up. I’ve been doing nothing but talking about toxic metals like mercury and cadmium and telling you not buy jewelry with them. There’s been a lot of warnings but not much of a solution besides telling you to talk about toxic metals. Therefore, this week I’m giving you a solution. I’m talking about precious metals.
Precious metals are metals that have four attributes. They are solid, scarce, non-toxic, and durable. These are the metals that cost the most to make or buy, that can be used as currency with less volatility, and that make the best jewelry. There are eight of them: silver, gold, platinum, palladium, rhodium, ruthenium, and osmium. Here are some of the reasons why they have those aforementioned attributes that non-precious, or base metals, do not have:
Solid-Precious metals are much less reactive to the elements than base metals. They melt at a much higher temperature than base metals and are much more malleable than base metals. This makes them easy to work with and jewelry smiths can take much more creative liberty when producing pieces for folks to wear.
Scarce-These metals often come from mines in places which are known to have gold, silver, or platinum, etc. in the ground, of which there are only a handful of spots concentrated in a few regions of each continent (Gold in the Amazon, silver in the U.S.’s Mountain West, diamonds in South Africa, Namibia, and Zimbabwe). This makes it very difficult to acquire them which in turn, makes them extremely valuable materials.
Non-toxic-They tend to have less radioactive isotopes at the molecular level than base metals do. This makes them far less likely to cause health problems for people who fabricate the metals or wear the metals in jewelry. (Unless they’ve been using toxic materials to fabricate their product like mercury or cyanide in gold)
Durable-The precious metals are durable because they do not corrode or oxidize (interact with oxygen and get damaged) as easily as base metals. If you’ve ever wondered why old American pennies (the pure copper ones) look so terrible, its because they’ve been oxidized enough times that the copper has been damaged.