know trying to find beautiful and affordable gold wedding jewelry can feel like an insurmountable task! At Looney Maiden Jewelry, we offer 14K gold fill designs for nearly all of our bridal, bridesmaid and even flower girl jewelry designs as well as for our wedding hair accessories. From crystal chokers to chandelier earrings, you can easily find stylish designs created in lovely 14K gold fill metals that will give you lasting jewelry to wear long after your wedding day.
There are several routes you can take in finding your gold wedding jewelry and your choices depend on what you want to spend on your beautiful jewelry set. Certainly you can choose to go with pure 14K and higher gold. There are many fine jewelers who create classic pearl designs in 14K to 24K gold. There is a limitation for the type of designs available and typically you could spend from $500 to $5,000 for your jewelry just depending on the type of settings and gems or diamonds involved in your design. Certainly the jewelry will last a lifetime for you. So the important decision is whether the jewelry design is what you are looking for and in your budget range.
Using 14K gold fill metals is a perfect way to add quality jewelry at much more affordable prices. The set above is a perfect example of a jewelry set special that works with the budget!
So you are asking what is the difference between 14k Gold-Filled versus Gold-Plated wedding jewelry?
Gold-plate is created using an electro-chemical processes. This process places a thin coating gold molecules, or most often something that really isn’t karat-gold, which leaves a gold color on copper or brass or some base metal. With gold plated jewelry it will be very shiny and bright gold. The gold color wears off pretty quickly when interacting with the wearer’s skin salts or the pollutants in the air, destroying your jewelry in short order.
Gold-filled, or gold-overlay, is created by heat and pressure bonding a layer of gold to a brass core. While the standard practice is 10% (weight) 12K gold, I use 14k Gold Fill in my jewelry. Gold-filled jewelry is a much more durable product than gold-plate. Over many, many years, the gold will naturally darken slightly giving that old style antique gold look like the jewelry our grandmothers may have handed down to you.. You can always shine it back up or let it take on the natural oxidation process. You can read even more here about gold wedding jewelry.
Above is a 14K gold fill wedding crystal choker necklace inspired with a renaissance design and created with Gold Shadow crystals and bronze Pearls.
I love working with 14K gold fill metals for a variety of reasons. First, I love that 14K gold fill chain and wire has what I call a spun gold look to it. It is soft and pretty and does not overtake the jewelry design. I love that I can create the same contemporary designs as I do in sterling silver. You can easily see in the pictures above contemporary designs that allow for a variety of crystals and pearls to be utilized in the designs.
Although the majority of my wedding jewelry designs are shown in sterling silver, they all can be special custom ordered in the 14K gold making just the perfect gold wedding jewelry set.
