In my long carrier as an engagement ring designer and master goldsmith I have personally made hundreds of engagement rings and I would estimate that at least 20% of the customers, came up with concepts of their own, totally striped of practicality. Way must one be practical when it comes to engagement ring? Engagement ring is a type of jewellery, one is expecting to last lifelong while hardly taking it off and even to pass to the next generation. The longevity of any fine jewellery piece depends on the way it is worn and on the quality of the materials it is made from.

Fine jewellery is generally made from materials that last long. Proof of this are existing ancient gold ornaments, some over 5000 thousand years of age, still having their initial aesthetic appeal. The metals currently used for fine jewellery, Gold, Platinum and Palladium are highly corrosion and temperature resistant and so are many of the precious and semi precious stones. While worn however the jewellery is exposed to abrasion, especially rings and arm ornaments. Abrasion slowly “eats” the metal of the ring, thinning the shank and flattening the detail until the ring brakes or the stones start falling off. The remedy for this is to remove the ring/s during intense physical activities (sport, gardening etc.), choose the right metal and an engagement ring design that suits one’s life style. Abrasion resistance and hardness of the metal are not the same property, and mistaking one for the other leads to unfavourable choice. Hard, low carat gold alloys for example are wearing off at much faster rate than the softer high carat ones. I can feel these properties very well while polishing a ring. Polishing is actually removing small amounts of metal via fine abrasives and it is very close to the mechanical process the engagement ring is exposed to during wearing. The hard 9ct and 14ct alloys are extremely easy to polish. In fact, if inexperienced, the polisher can easily polish off the tips of the prongs or the beads of the pave. Polishing platinum ring on the other hand is rather complicated. Although softer, polishing off even a shallow scratch on platinum is an impossible task and the goldsmith has to regress and use different grades of sandpaper first. This is the property that makes platinum the number one metal for diamond engagement rings. It just does not wear off.  I had opportunity to examine delicate platinum rings with intricate design made between 1920 and 1930. The detail was still fresh and well articulated as on a new item.  In tests concluded by Hoover &Strong platinum proved to have 23% better abrasion resistance than 14k white gold. Compared with the same 14k white gold alloy palladium was 15% better.

In a nutshell : Platinum is the top metal  for engagement ring settings, closely followed by palladium and white gold, not so close behind. Avoid low carat gold alloys since they wear off really fast.