The current article is relevant to Carats (Ct) and explores its variations among jewelry and precious stones!

The Carat is to be considered a measurement unit not only of gold but also of precious stones. The difference lies in the fact that gold Carats are used as a metric system of consistency (of gold) of each jewel. To be more concrete, there are 6, 8, 9, 14, 18 and 22 Carats jewels that are available in the marketplace. So, in which way does the classification of jewels take place according to Carats? Taking into account that a golden jewel is divided into 24 pieces of gold, the Carats are the solid pieces of gold that compose the jewel. It is useful to note that 6 Carats golden jewels are very rare around the world and they are coming from Asian countries such as China and India whilst in Greek market its existence is highly unlikely. The same situation stands also for golden jewels of 8 Carats. As far as the 9 Carats jewels are concerned, they are used widely in Europe, but less frequently in Greece.

In Greek gold jewelry 14 Carats golden jewels are the most used ones. A 14 Carats jewel is composed of 58.33% solid gold, while the rest 41.67% contains other alloys. Additionally, not only in the Greek marketplace but also internationally, 18 Carats jewels are widely known. A piece of jewelry of 18 Carats weight is composed of 75% solid gold, while the other 25% is composed of other alloys. Golden jewels of 22 Carats are to be considered luxurious due to its high commercial price and its rare construction. It is worth of mentioning that a 22 Carats jewel contains 91, 6% solid gold and the rest 8, 34% includes other kinds of metal amalgams. It should also be noted that the clarity of metals is denoted in each jewel with the “per mil” system. For instance, an 18 Carats jewel comprised of 75% solid gold is symbolized as 750. Respectively, jewels of 14 Carats are symbolized as 585, while the ones of 22 Carats as 916.

On the other hand, as far as the diamonds are concerned, the Carat is to be considered as a metric system of the stone weight. The history of Carat has its roots back to the first precious stones merchandisers, who searched for a very slight unit of weight measurement. For this reason, locust beans were widely used for stone weighing. In ancient Greek, the word for locust was “keration”, a loan word of the Arabian word “qirat”, while in Latin was referred to as “cerato”, a form that decisively contributed in the French and English designation, namely Carat.