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White rhodium
White gold rings, silver, diamond settings
The standard. A hard, bright, neutral mirror over white gold or silver, with no warmth left in it. This is the finish most people mean when they ask for rhodium.
The finishes
Five finishes, and the reasons a jeweller picks one over another.
Colour is not decoration here. Each of these does something specific to how a piece reads — how bright the metal is, how white a stone looks, and how much of the carving you can still see.
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Ganga-Jamuna
Traditional sets, bangles, temple work, borders
Two tones on one piece — the yellow left as gold, the rest taken to white. Named for the Ganga and the Yamuna, two rivers of different colour meeting and running on together, which is precisely what the finish looks like.
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Pink / rose
Contemporary pieces, second tone in two-tone
A warm rose cast, used on its own for a softer piece or as the second colour where a yellow-and-white two-tone would be too stark.
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Black rhodium
Oxidised looks, diamond contrast, men’s pieces
Deep gunmetal, almost charcoal. Its real trick is optical: against black rhodium a white diamond reads noticeably whiter and brighter than it does against yellow metal.
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Antique rhodium
Temple jewellery, carved and traditional work
An aged finish that sits down into the recesses of a piece and leaves the high points brighter — the depth that carved and temple work is designed to show and that a uniform bright plate flattens out.
Swatches are indicative colour, not photographs of plated pieces. The finish on your work depends on the metal underneath it, and the only honest sample is a piece of your own we have plated — ask, and we will do one.
Ganga-Jamuna
The line between the two tones is the whole job
A two-tone piece is not plated twice. It is plated once, with everything that must stay gold stopped off by hand — painted out with a resist, so the rhodium simply cannot reach it.
Which means the finished boundary is exactly as good as the hand that drew it. A masking line that wanders by half a millimetre is visible from across a room on a bangle, because the eye follows a border far more readily than it follows a surface.
There is no machine step that fixes this afterwards. It is done at the bench, under a lamp, by somebody who has drawn that line ten thousand times.
Where the name comes from
The Ganga and the Yamuna meet at Prayag carrying visibly different colours of water, and run on together without mixing for some distance. A two-tone piece does the same thing in metal — two colours side by side, each staying itself.
Which is why the trade never called it “two-tone”. It called it after the rivers.
Sending two-tone work? Mark it up.
Tell us exactly which parts stay yellow — a sketch, a marked photograph or a plated sample all work. “Ganga-Jamuna” on its own means five different things to five different karigars, and the one thing that cannot be fixed after plating is a boundary drawn in the wrong place.
Which one for which job
A quick reference, if you are deciding on the phone.
| If you want… | Ask for |
|---|---|
| White gold that actually looks white | White rhodium |
| A diamond to read as bright as possible | Black rhodium around the setting |
| Carving and detail to stay visible | Antique rhodium |
| Traditional gold with white highlights | Ganga-Jamuna |
| Something warmer than white, softer than gold | Pink / rose |
| A worn piece brought back | Strip, polish and replate |
Bring the work to the bench
The workshop is in Zaveri Bazar and has been since 1994. Tell us the metal, the finish and the quantity, and we will tell you what the job takes.
Kanchwala Building, 3rd Floor, Room No. 28, 63 Dhanji Street, Zaveri Bazar, Mumbai 400003