The Essential Guide to Gay and Lesbian Weddings by Tess Ayers & Paul Brown

Author:Tess Ayers & Paul Brown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Experiment
Published: 2012-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

My partner and I went to a jewelry store in Chinatown in San Francisco to buy rings for our commitment ceremony. We knew we’d get a good deal there, but we were really nervous about getting a reaction to the fact that we’re lesbians, so we decided to be really low-key about it. We walked in and told the clerk that we wanted to buy some plain gold bands. He said, “Ah, yes, you want wedding rings!”

—Kit Cherry

Gold Diggers: A Quick Lesson in Gold

White or yellow 14-karat or 18-karat is the most commonly used gold for wedding bands today, but what do color and karats mean?

First of all, do you remember seeing gold on the periodic table of the elements in your seventh-grade science room—atomic number 79, symbol “Au”? Well, that element in its pure form is way too soft for jewelry; you’d be molding your ring like Silly Putty. So they take pure gold and alloy it with other metals (platinum, nickel, zinc, copper, iron, even aluminum) for strength. And which of these other metals are used determines the color of the gold—white, yellow, rose-colored, and so on. They can make red gold, black gold, green gold, and—yes, lavender lovers—even purple gold.

Okay, now what about those karat things? When you’re dealing with gold, karat means one-twenty-fourth—so 24-karat gold is pure gold, and 12-karat gold is half gold and half whatever. (You should definitely be suspicious of that guy on the street corner trying to sell you a 28-karat gold ring.)

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.