Discover a metal of particular rarity
Rare, noble, and precious. Gold immediately springs to mind? No, it's rhodium. Here are three things you need to know about this more-than-precious metal.
- It's ultra-rare . If you took all the gold in the world, down to the last nugget of antique jewelry, you could make a cube 20 meters on each side. For rhodium, this cube would be 100 times smaller. Well, it would still weigh 22 tons.
- It owes its name to the word “rhodon,” which means rose in ancient Greek. In 1803, British chemist William Hyde Wollaston discovered a dark red powder while treating a sample of platinum. A few chemical reactions later, and it transformed into a shiny metal. Rhodium was “born” and joined the platinum family. Better still, it is one of the few metals that does not dissolve in royal water, an acid beloved by alchemists, still used by chemists and so powerful that it dissolves gold.
- It is valuable in many areas . Airplane candles, pen nibs, but especially jewelry, where rhodium makes other precious metals shine with its immaculate brilliance. At Statement, its plating measures between 0.5 and 1 micron, or 2,000 to 5,000 layers of atoms stacked on top of each other.
Rhodium enhances the lunar glow of each of our pieces and helps preserve the silver, which develops a patina over the days and throughout your life.
