Rose Gold.
It’s seemingly everywhere these days.
The Disney parks are especially going through a period of Rose Gold mania, but even outside
of Disney the color is experiencing a new wave of popularity.
So what is Rose Gold, where did it come from, and why is it so popular?
Gold is an extremely soft metal.
So soft in fact that one of the ways prospectors would test the gold nuggets they found in
order to make sure it wasn’t pyrite was by biting down on it.
So naturally it wouldn’t make sense to craft jewelry with pure gold.
It would just get damaged too easily.
So in order to make gold jewelry more durable, it’s almost always mixed with other metals
to create a more durable alloy.
For instance, a typical 18 carat gold ring would be about 75% gold, and the other 25%
would be a mixture of metals like copper, zinc, and silver.
What people found was that playing around with the combination of that 25% would affect
the coloring of the final product.
For instance if you work a decent amount of nickel into that alloy, you’d end up with
white gold.
It was the late 1800s when famous Russian jeweler Karl Faberge found that if that 25%
of the alloy was primarily made up of copper, the gold would take on a light pinkish hue.
He worked the metal into what would ultimately become his namesake, Faberge Eggs.
It wasn’t the very first instance of rose gold.
After all, the metal had been used by people for thousands of years and impurities when
smelting would naturally lead to gold of different colors.
However, it was certainly the catalyst of it’s modern popularity.
From there the pink metal would become commonplace in Russian jewelry crafting, so much so that
at first it was referred to as Russian Gold.
Then, like most aspects of fashion, it would spend the next hundred years falling in and
out of style.
It would fall out of style at the end of the Victorian era, and then find itself in style
again in the 1920s when Cartier, in 1924, would create the famous trinity ring which
featured yellow, rose, and white gold all at once.
It would hang around for a decade and then in the 1930s the more minimalist and monochromatic
trends of the time would push rose gold out of the spotlight for platinum.
That too would go on for a number of years until World War II.
Platinum was an important metal when it came to the war effort, and so it’s civilian
use was limited.
As a result it forced jewelers to turn back to traditional yellow gold, as well as rose
gold, which lead to a resurgence in popularity.
Most recently we saw it start to make a comeback in the fashion world around 2012, and it would
only be another couple of years before that would spread to another field: technology.
While Apple is seldom the first to do something, they usually manage to popularize whatever
they put out.
Usually.
In May of 2015, with Rose Gold a year or two into it’s resurgence and already offered
on a few Samsung phones, Apple decided to work the color into their new product that
merged tech with fashion accessory, the Apple Watch.
A few short months later in September the color would make it’s way over to the new
iPhone 6S and that’s when it really took off.
It was reported that up to 40% of the phones pre-orders were for the Rose Gold color.
It would take another two years for the trend to officially make it’s way over to the
Disney Parks, and in the summer of 2017 Disney would release a pair of Rose Gold Minnie Ears.
Now perhaps it was forced scarcity on Disney’s part, or maybe they really didn’t know
how popular it was going to be.
Whatever the reason, the initial run of the ears quickly sold out and future restocks
would find themselves being bought up within hours.
Then, as is often the case, the rarity of the ears further fueled their popularity,
which in turn kept them rare.
And now here we are, a year later.
They’re no longer impossible to find, and we sit in the middle of what might be the
height of rose gold fever.
We’ve got rose gold ears, rose gold spirit jerseys,
rose gold cupcakes, and even rose gold churros.
Will it go away?
Certainly.
Like most fashion trends, it’s popularity will wax and wane over time.
Let’s just hope that happens before we end up with a Rose Gold Spaceship Earth.