The chemical element is Au derived from the Latin word for gold, "aurum" meaning "shining dawn", a reference to its shiny luster and bright yellow color.

Gold is one of the most useful metals on this earth, valued for its rarity, beauty and unique properties. With an attractive yellow color, high luster, resistance to corrosion and tarnishing, it is soft and malleable and can be drawn into wires, hammered into sheets or cast into shapes.

Gold today has a wide range of uses from creating jewelry, coins, bullion bars, in electronics, medicine, dentistry, cuisine, pigments, gilding, space technology and optics.

Because of the softness of pure (24k) gold, it is usually alloyed with other metals for use in jewelry, altering its hardness and ductility, melting point, color and other properties. Alloys with lower karat rating, typically 22k, 18k, 14k or 10k, contain higher percentages of copper, silver, palladium or other base metals in the alloy.

‘Karat’ is the measurement of purity of gold alloyed with other metals. 24 Karat is pure gold with no other metals. Lower Karat contain less gold; For example, 18 Karat gold contains 75 per cent gold and 25 per cent other metals, often copper or silver.

Yellow gold jewelry is still the most popular color, but today gold is available in a diverse palette. 

White gold is created through alloying pure gold with white metals such as palladium or silver. In addition it is usually plated with rhodium to create a harder surface with a brighter shine. 

The weight of gold is measured in troy ounces (1 troy ounce = 31.1034768 grams), however its purity is measured in ‘Karats’.