White gold jewelry gets that enviable shine from a rhodium plating. We unpack rhodium plating, from how it grew into industry standard, its limitations as a precious metal and how thick rhodium plating on your jewelry should be.

White Gold’s Rise in Popularity
White gold only became popular in the last few decades. During World War II, wartime efforts needed all available platinum and palladium to manufacture military equipment. In turn, jewelers were looking for an alternate precious metal as a viable substitute.

Enter white gold.

Years before this, jewelers combined yellow gold with the alloying (and “bleaching”) metal nickel to create white gold. However, with the strict rationing of platinum in the 1940s, white gold’s popularity took off as a platinum look alike. Once World War II ended and platinum became available again, white gold remained a popular jewelry making material, largely because it’s roughly four times less expensive than platinum.

The Commercialization of Rhodium Plating
Since then, jewelers have vastly improved the everyday wearability of white gold by adding a “top coat” of rhodium plating. Before rhodium plating became widespread, white gold made with nickel would quickly darken when exposed to chlorine and certain cleaning products. Rhodium plating eliminated that rapid discoloration.

Rhodium plating gives white gold that desired high-shine and white-hot mirror effect. Although rhodium is a member of the platinum family, it is primarily used to improve the jewelry’s aesthetic—not necessarily to protect the underlying white gold from everyday bumps and scrapes. Rhodium will fade away with frequent wear so you will need to have your most-worn white gold jewelry pieces re-plated roughly every six months.

Understanding Rhodium Plating Thickness
White gold jewelry also needs to be regularly re-plated because the thickness of rhodium plating is incredibly thin, ranging from 0.5 – 2.5 microns. (For comparison, a strand from a spider’s silk web is 3 microns.) As durable as rhodium is as a metal, its thin coating on your white gold jewelry means it is easily scratched and worn.

Here are the expert recommended thickness coatings, pending the item being rhodium plated: