Why we work in recycled gold

There is a polite fiction in fine jewelry that the gold in a new ring has been freshly birthed from a mine. It hasn't. Gold has been recirculating through human hands for six thousand years. The ring on your finger almost certainly contains atoms that once belonged to a Roman coin, a Mughal earring, a Victorian wedding band.

Mined gold is, by almost any measure, a mess. The largest gold mines move thousands of tons of earth to extract a few ounces of metal. The chemistry involved — cyanide leaching, mercury amalgamation — leaves rivers undrinkable for generations. The labor conditions in artisanal mines, where most of the world's gold actually comes from, range from grim to inhumane.

And yet — the gold itself is the same. Pure 24-karat gold is identical at the atomic level whether it came out of the ground last year or out of an old watch case in a Geneva refinery. It cannot be distinguished by any laboratory test. There is no "new" quality and "old" quality, no "fresh" gold and "recycled" gold. There is only gold.

This is the case for recycled gold in three sentences: it is chemically identical, it is in plentiful supply, and the alternative is genuinely terrible. The case for mined gold, when you push at it, dissolves into marketing.

Where ours comes from

We buy our gold from a refinery in Italy that processes scrap from three sources: old jewelry traded in by retailers, industrial waste from electronics recycling, and bullion from estates. Every batch is melted, purified to four-nines (99.99%), and re-cast into the alloy we work with. The chain of custody is documented; we'll send you the certificate if you ever want one.

It costs us slightly more per ounce than the spot price of mined gold. We are happy to pay it.

What this means for your ring

Nothing, in the way that matters most. Your ring will be exactly as soft, exactly as warm in color, exactly as durable as it would be if we had used freshly mined metal. It will dent the same way. It will polish the same way. It will outlive you in the same way.

The difference is upstream of you. Somewhere, a river is one ring less polluted. That's all.