Life's Little Mysteries

What is a Gold Karat?

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Most gold jewelry isn’t made of pure gold.

The amount of gold in a necklace or ring is measured on the karat scale. Pure gold is 24 karats. Bars of gold kept in Fort Knox and elsewhere around the world are considered to be 99.95 percent pure, 24-karat gold.

As metals are added to gold during jewelry making, the gold becomes less fine and the number of karats drops. For example, 12 karat gold contains 50 percent gold and 50 percent alloys by weight.

The word karat comes from the carob seed. In ancient Asian bazaars, the seeds were used to balance scales that measured the weight of gold.

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Corey Binns
Corey Binns lives in Northern California and writes about science, health, parenting, and social change. In addition to writing for Live Science, she's contributed to publications including Popular Science, TODAY.com, Scholastic, and the Stanford Social Innovation Review as well as others. She's also produced stories for NPR’s Science Friday and Sundance Channel. She studied biology at Brown University and earned a Master's degree in science journalism from NYU. The Association of Health Care Journalists named her a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Health Journalism Fellow in 2009. She has chased tornadoes and lived to tell the tale.