CARROT

While we can all appreciate that a Carrot is an orange cone shaped vegetable, a fan favourite with cartoon character Bugs Bunny, the pronunciation of it sounds the same as Carat or Karat. When working with precious jewellery, we don’t use Carrots… in any shape or form. Unless of course we’re snacking on them, which in this case would usually be paired with Celery and Hummus.

CARAT

The term CARAT is used to describe the weight of a Diamond. While people usually associate weight with size of the diamond, this is not the case. Size refers to dimensions, while “carat” is the standard unit of weight when referring to diamonds or gemstones.

For example, you see a diamond advertised as 0.92ct (ct symbolises carats). This means that this diamond weighs 0.92ct and is sometimes referred to as 92 points. 100 points is equal to 1.00ct.

Just to throw a spanner in the works; The term Carat is also used to describe gold, for example on the inside of a ring you may see a stamp labelled “9ct or 18ct”, this is referring to the purity of gold not the diamond or gemstone weight. We explain this in further detail next:

KARAT

The term KARAT is predominantly used throughout the United States, Asia & Europe to describe the purity of gold content in the item of jewellery. The term Carat is used for the same purpose but mainly seen in Australia and UK.

In jewellery, karat (often abbreviated as K) is a measure of the purity of gold, indicating how much pure gold is in an alloy compared to other metals such as copper, silver, platinum, and sometimes even nickel.  The karat system is used to express the percentage of gold in a piece of jewellery.