Rose Gold, Red Gold, Pink Gold - What’s The Difference?

These apparently interchangeable terms actually reflect real differences.

This one comes to you courtesy of my older son Zach, who finds luxury in general uninteresting, but whose research skills I have depended on more than once; I wanted to find out what typeface Casio had used on one of the most basic and inexpensive watches on the Internet (also one worn by Pope Francis) and after I had spent most of a day trying to identify the typeface with no luck he came up with the correct tyepface in ten minutes. Sometimes you ask the guy with highly specific research skills to dig you out of a corner. After looking at the latest releases from AP I got to wondering just what the basic differences were between yellow, pink, rose and red gold alloys so I put him on it and here’s what we dug up.

One can be forgiven for not knowing offhand the difference between rose gold, red gold, and pink gold. At a glance, they seem to be different terms for the same thing - gold with a reddish hue to it. That somewhat pedestrian definition is not wrong, of course. “Gold that is slightly red” is, factually, what all three terms mean, and though they are not exactly the same thing, they are similar enough to be used interchangeably by a great many people.

Unfortunately, this can result in the originally distinct terms being used, strictly speaking, incorrectly or at least, confusingly. A watch, or ring, or bracelet that is referred to as rose gold may in fact be, definitionally, pink gold, or red, through no real fault of anyone involved in the naming process. But innocent ignorance is still ignorance, and I suppose that’s where irrepressible pedantics like myself come in.

Giving fancy names to colored gold is hardly a modern trend. Indeed, it would seem to go back to the earliest days of gold as a luxury item. Any history buffs in the audience may be familiar with electrum. Electrum is a naturally-occurring alloy of gold, copper, and silver, ranging in color from pale yellow to a more concentrated yellow depending on the proportions of metals, that was widely used in the Bronze and early Iron ages. From coins in ancient Greece and Anatolia, to the pointed caps of Egyptian pyramids and obelisks, electrum was widely recognized as a valuable metal. The kingdom of Lydia (located in what is now Turkey) was apparently the first culture to widely mint their coins out of electrum, which was appreciated as a material for coins because as an alloy it was harder and more durable than pure gold.

Unfortunately, it was difficult in those days to know exactly how much gold was in the alloy the coin was made of. A sneaky or desperate minter could start manufacturing coins with less gold in them than before, allowing more coins to be made for less gold. Naturally, once the people who used those coins caught on, they would value the coins less and stop using them. Electrum coins thus became devalued, and by the 4th century BC coins made of pure gold or silver were more favored, and electrum had once again been relegated to being more of a decorative metal than a practical one.

Today this is no longer an issue, as in modern gold alloys the percentage of gold in the alloy is always the same – 18 karat gold is always 75% pure gold, plus 25% of other metals. To put it simply, the difference between the three terms officially is how much copper has been alloyed with the gold, with red gold having the most copper, followed by rose gold, then pink with the least amount of copper (and a higher percentage of silver). The issue of pure gold content is therefore not a problem – no one’s going to walk into a shop with a leather sack full of rose gold wristwatches they intend to use to buy two carpets and a goat, only to be run out of town three days later because the watches were actually red gold.

If I had purchased a piece of jewelry that I thought had a certain amount of gold in it, then found out it had a different amount than I had paid for, I would certainly feel as though I had been misled. I might even go so far as to decline to purchase from whoever had sold me the item again, even if the mistake had been entirely honest. But today, with the percentage of pure gold in an 18k gold alloy no longer open to question, the value of a gold alloy based on the percentage of pure gold is no longer a problem.

This leads into what is probably a necessary disclaimer. Most people who mislabel red, rose, and pink gold are likely not doing so to mislead. The difference between the big three is subtle, amounting in many cases to only a few percentages, and the fact that the terms are used somewhat interchangeably makes the differences even harder to see.

Just how red an alloy is, depends on the amount of gold vs. other metals. A 2000 issue of Gold Bulletin, in the article, “Gold in Watchmaking,” by Lucien Treub, says, “The buyer of an 18 ct yellow gold watch has a choice of half a dozen colours plus another good half dozen for white gold. There are distinct national preferences: German 18 ct gold is bright yellow (‘2N’) and contains 10% copper and 15% silver, while the Swiss variety is a darker yellow (‘3N’) and contains 12% copper and 13% silver. The latter colour is preferred in combination with steel for ‘bicolore’ cases and bracelets. Rosé gold (‘4N’) contains 16% copper and 9% silver, while red gold (‘5N’) contains 21% copper and only 4% silver. Watchcases are mostly made of the 2N type, as 95% of Swiss made gold watches are exported. However, certain manufacturers insist on rosé or red gold as their ‘trademark’ (4N and 5N colours).” You can get even redder alloys by reducing the percentage of gold. 12 karat red gold for instance has 50% gold and 50% copper.

Obviously, there are some sellers who can be reasonably expected to know better than others. Although the exact percentages of metal in a colored gold alloy are not commonly communicated by watch brands, it would appear that the terms, at least sometimes, are actually used to refer to alloys with different percentages of silver and copper – at least some of the time. If you hope to see the terms used precisely, you may be on more solid ground with a well-established brand.

If you know that the terms actually do refer to real variations in the amounts of copper and silver, you can sometimes tell simply by looking. Again some brands specify the alloy used and some don’t. Patek Philippe says that the Nautilus Ladies Automatic alloy is “pink gold” and leaves it at that; Vacheron Constantin says its Overseas Chronograph is in “pink gold” but also specifies 5N, and the Omega says the Seamaster Aqua Terra is made of “red gold” and says 5N. The differences can be hard to detect visually, although 5N gold is noticeably redder than other alloys. One cannot help but wonder, in fact, if the reason “rose gold” seems to be the preferred term is because it is visually distinct from pure gold, but still sounds close enough to simply “gold” to the average person.

As ever, the best course of action when thinking about buying a rose gold object (or red or pink, as the case may be) is to perform a certain degree of research beforehand. Knowing that there is a difference between each type can help you observe more closely and make a better educated decision as to which is for you. How red do you want your pink, rose, or red gold watch to be? Does the maker or manufacturer take care to use the terms in their strictly correct manner, or are they more liberal in their terminology? And, most importantly, would you rather make like Lydian king Croesus and deal in pure gold instead?