More and More Couples Go for the (White) Gold

Stacey Sutherland and her fiance, Robert McCullough, haven’t settled on a date yet for their fast-approaching summer wedding--but they are firm on one issue.

“It never occurred to me my wedding ring would be anything other than platinum,” says Sutherland, a film production manager living in Los Angeles. Her grandmother had platinum slipped on her finger at the altar, but the 30-year-old’s motives are not so much about family customs.

“White metals,” she says, “are the hot metal.”

Try molten.

Platinum jewelry sales shot up 60% in 1996, the most recent year tracked by National Jeweler Magazine, versus only 2.8% for gold jewelry. Engagement and wedding rings account for most of the platinum frenzy. Just flip through magazines from Martha Stewart to Modern Bride, which are crammed with ads hawking platinum sets.

The thickest magazine of them all for the altar-bound, Bride’s, recently reported as many as 54% of its surveyed readers considered platinum bands. Among that bunch, 39% selected it. For the majority who opted for gold, price was the reason.

Platinum is costly because it takes 10 tons of ore to mine a single ounce compared to 3 tons of gold to produce 1 ounce. Prices fluctuate daily, but an ounce of gold is about $287 and an ounce of platinum is $355.

While sales of gold--both white and yellow--remain billions of dollars ahead of any metal, the proliferation of platinum is significant, according to industry observers who point out that its presence was nearly nonexistent only a decade ago.

A pure, highly dense metal that doesn’t tarnish or scratch, platinum was proclaimed a strategic metal by the U.S. government in 1940, thereby banning its use in jewelry. Once the war ended and the ban was lifted, consumers were sold on gold. High-end retailers such as Cartier, Tiffany & Co. and Harry Winston continued to offer platinum settings, but most brides didn’t find its rarity and purity enough to justify the price tag.

That was then.

“We’re moving into a different era. Where we’ve long been in a golden age, people are looking to distance themselves from the past. They’re looking to acquire special items which reflect a new era of understated elegance, sophistication,” says Laurie Hudson, president of Platinum Guild International USA Jewelry Inc. in Newport Beach and widely considered the brains behind the marketing blitz that revived the metal this decade.

As a result, Hudson says, engaged couples are willing to splurge a little more on their rings.