Solid Gold, Always
A lot of "gold" jewelry on the market is gold-plated brass — a few microns of gold electroplated over a base metal that wears through within months of normal wear. Gold-filled is a step up, a thicker mechanically-bonded layer, but it's still a shell over something else.
When we say solid gold, here's what we mean: 10 or 14k true solid gold. What you buy is what's still there in ten years.
10K vs. 14K: The Actual Difference
10K gold is 41.7% pure gold. The minimum legally allowed to be called "gold" in the US. The remaining 58.3% is alloy (typically copper, silver, or zinc), which is exactly why it's the hardest of the common karats. It holds up best under daily wear and costs less, because you're paying for less actual gold.
14K gold is 58.3% pure gold. Less alloy, more gold, which means a warmer, richer color and a slightly softer metal. It's still durable enough for everyday wear, just not as resistant to scratching as 10K. It's the standard for engagement and wedding rings because the color reads truer.
The tradeoff: 10K is tougher and more affordable. 14K has a richer color and more gold value. Neither is objectively better. It depends what you're optimizing for.
White Gold: Why It Costs More
White gold isn't a separate metal, it's yellow gold alloyed with white metals (usually palladium or nickel) to lighten its color. Even alloyed, it still carries a warm undertone on its own. To get the bright, cool-white finish most people expect, every piece is plated in rhodium, a metal in the platinum family that trades in the thousands of dollars per troy ounce (one of the most expensive metals on earth, gold included).
White gold is a good choice for a lot of people. It just comes with periodic upkeep, and we think that's worth knowing upfront rather than discovering later.
Vermeil, Held to a Higher Bar
It's easy to assume the gemstone is the expensive part of a piece. Transparently, gold is the primary cost driver in jewelry nowadays. Which is why we're currently sampling vermeil (Gold plated over silver). What we control is the thickness of the gold layer, and it's the difference between vermeil that looks good for a season and vermeil that actually holds up.
The US legal minimum to even call something "vermeil" is a gold layer of 2.5 microns over sterling silver. But we're building our vermeil to sit meaningfully above that floor, because the goal isn't to hit the legal minimum, it's to make something we'd be comfortable wearing and buying ourselves. Accessible doesn't mean cutting the corner that determines whether it lasts.
Our Lab Diamonds: D–F, VS1+
Every diamond we set is lab-grown. Same carbon, same crystal structure, same fire as a mined diamond, grown in weeks instead of formed over a billion years underground. They're graded on the same scale mined diamonds are graded on, by the same labs (GIA, IGI).
We only work with D–F color (the colorless range, the top of the scale, with no visible tint even next to a comparison stone) and VS1 clarity or better (any inclusions are difficult to detect under 10x magnification and invisible to the naked eye).
Our Lab Gemstones
The same standard applies to our color stones: sapphires, rubies, and more. Our lab-grown gems are grown from the same mineral as their natural counterparts, using controlled heat-and-pressure processes that mirror what happens underground, just on a much shorter timeline. Chemically identical. Same hardness.
Small Batch Quality
Every piece that leaves OSO is inspected and finished by hand before it reaches you. That means checking each piece for setting security, finish quality, and symmetry, and hand-finishing the details a machine can't judge: polish, edges, the details that separate a considered piece from a manufactured one.
It's why we produce in small batches. It's slower than mass production, but we prioritize the OSO standard.