It gives off a shimmer that seduces the eye. It glows with a unique, almost celestial radiance.

It is always a joy to behold your very own piece of gold jewellery. As you gaze at it, you might be reminded of a magical moment, a turning point in your life, or a special loved one. Jewellery is a bearer of memories, a symbol of the most important decisions in life and, in many cases, of a reward — gold goes to the victor.

Perhaps jewellery could best be described as a small, extremely personal token of our personal memories — one which can conveniently always be worn on the body.

And since jewellery is so close to our hearts, it’s good to know where it comes from and how it is made.

Sooner or later, our thirst for knowledge about precious metals will take us to Pforzheim, Germany. Gold is at the heart of this city, which lies to the north of the Black Forest. In 1767 Margrave Karl Friedrich von Baden equipped the town’s orphanage with a watch and jewellery making workshop to provide his protégés with employment. The nobleman invited highly skilled craftsmen to train the orphans.

By implementing this project, Karl Friedrich von Baden laid the foundations of Pforzheim’s gold industry. Today Pforzheim is the centre of the German jewellery and watchmaking industry. Altogether, 70 per cent of the sector’s turnover is generated here.

It therefore comes as no surprise that this city of approximately 120,000 inhabitants is also home to Germany’s most important gold processing businesses, as well as a College of Design, Technology and Business, several renowned goldsmith colleges and the most important jewellery museum in the world.

Here, just as in Schwäbisch Gmünd, Germany’s second major centre of the jewellery industry, smooth, cool bars of gold — which are currently valued at 20,000 euros per kilogram — are made malleable so that jewellery designers can transform them into works of art. One of these works is the Colonna ring BY KIM, which is embellished with 20 baguette-cut gold citrines and 62 brilliant-cut diamonds.

It is an impressively modern and expressive piece of jewellery. Pforzheim represents an important stop on the journey from gold to jewellery. Although gold is heavy (its specific weight is almost double that of silver, and it is even heavier than lead), pure 24 C gold is too soft to last in the shape of a watch, ring or pendant. First it has to be alloyed — that is, fortified with other metals such as silver, which change the gold’s crystal structure and make it stronger and more resistant.

“Similar metals are easy to combine,” explains Thomas Laag, an engineer and product manager at C. Hafner, one of the best-known gold and silver refi neries in Pforzheim. The alloying process is a real science unto itself, explains the 39-yearold metallurgist.

Depending on the ingredients and the mixing ratio, the precious metal will acquire different qualities and a whole range of breathtaking colours. For instance, a higher proportion of copper will give rise to the reddish and rose tints that are currently so much in demand. On the other hand, if palladium is added as a “bleaching agent” white gold is produced. Six standardised colours have been defined for gold alloys, ranging from ON for green-yellow to 5N for red — from sunrise to sunset, so to speak. The highly desirable Colonna ring, for instance, is made of rose gold, which has the tint of a romantic sunset.

Noted trend expert André Leon Talley of US Vogue magazine explains why these warm reddish tones are so popular right now. “There is a general sensibility for romance in the air, and gold is its visible expression — gold in all of its many shades, especially delicate rose and warm red,” he enthuses. After many years, elegant and fl attering shades such as 4N (pink) and 5N (red) are experiencing a tremendous comeback. And perhaps they have never set so strong an accent as today, when these popular tints are being paired with citrine, tourmaline and smoky quartz, or being used to create cutting-edge vintage looks. Together with white and yellow gold, they are being combined into unusual, luxurious designs. These colours are now giving timepieces an elegant new twist.

Working with gold is a matter of trust, and the C. Hafner company in Bleichstrasse has an established and successful track record in the business. Its workshop is full of green-painted machines, large strip mill rollers, stamping equipment, melting furnaces and continuous casting machines. Metalworkers are busy concentrating on the work at hand, clad in silver aprons, their faces protected by big safety goggles.

It is warm in here and — rather unusually for a forge — the fl oors are swept clean. That’s because the litter produced here is so valuable. The discarded metal scraps contain gold dust, and hence even the water from the sink is fi ltered every day in order to catch any stray particles.

All of these efforts are very worthwhile — after all, each gram of gold costs 20 euros. Originally, recovering precious metals was the main business of the so-called parting works that sprang up as satellites of the jewellery industry 150 years ago.

Nowadays at C. Hafner, most of the material processed is recycled gold that has been reclaimed at the company’s own special facilities, which are located outside of Pforzheim. As a result, the gold returns to the production cycle, where it can be reused rather than going to waste. Incidentally, most gold is used for making jewellery. Approximately 75 percent of the 2,500 tons of gold mined each year is processed by the jewellery industry.

Alloying metal is an ancient craft, and it’s a little like cooking. The recipes are usually kept secret. At the workshop “cabinet”, employees prepare the ingredients for the melting process. Georg Besesek, who has been with C. Hafner for 14 years, checks his assignment sheet: four kilos of 18 C gold, it says. Eighteen carats indicates that the material consists to 75 percent of fine gold. Wempe exclusively uses this grade, which is also known as 750 gold.

The valuable ingredients are now placed into a graphite crucible. The furnace has long been up to temperature. The experienced gold smelter — whose official job designation is “materials process technician” — can tell when the temperature is exactly right just by looking at the colour of the glowing metal. Using long tongs, Georg Besesek removes the crucible from the induction furnace. At a temperature of 1,100 degrees Celsius, both the crucible and its contents are shimmering with an orange glow. In fact, glancing at the mixture is like looking at the sun.

A moment later, the radiant liquid is poured into moulds, which, accompanied by a mighty hissing noise, are then transferred into quenching basins of cold water to cool. The resulting semi-finished products — tubes, wires, sheets and wafers of alloyed gold in all shapes and sizes — are shipped to their customers, the goldsmiths and jewellers. The transportation is carried out under constant and comprehensive security monitoring conditions, of course.

Semi-finished products from Pforzheim also make their way to the Wempe goldsmiths’ workshop in Schwäbisch Gmünd. This is where Kim-Eva Wempe and her French Creative Director Catherine Plouchard have set up their studio. Forty goldsmiths, stone setters and fine polishers work here.

Their main focus is on the painstaking and intensive development of the unique designs and trend-oriented catwalk collections that are brought together under the BY KIM brand. This is where the sparkling idea for the Colonna ring first originated.

This is also where the first model of the ring was made on the basis of the initial conceptual design, while the gold for the final product was being melted in Pforzheim. Silver prototypes are crafted separately for each newly designed piece of jewellery and are used as starting elements for creating rubber moulds.

These in turn are removed from the silver prototype and used to produce individual wax models, one for each piece of jewellery. Lined up and dried, they look pretty already: smooth, shimmering wax rings with tiny gaps where the gems will later sparkle. Now the wax rings are attached to the branches of a small wax tree which is placed inside a high cuvette. Next, the container is filled with a liquid plaster, difficult to watch as that may be.

After drying briefly, it is transferred to the furnace. The upper section is a vacuum furnace. The cuvette is placed upside down in the lower half, so that the tip of the tree is facing down. Now the gold wafers are added to the crucible. The hotter it gets, the faster they melt into a thick fl uid, while the wax liquefies and pours out of the lower cylinder. Now the coast is clear for the liquid gold to fl ow into the cavities. This process is called “lost-wax casting”.

With a long set of tongs, the cuvette is now transferred to a basin to cool off. The water fizzes and bubbles, and then a little golden tree emerges, adorned with precious rings. After the jewellery is clipped off, any remaining plaster is removed by miniature rinsing machines and high-pressure cleaners, revealing the gold in all its radiance.

After drying, each ring is additionally polished, engraved or studded with gems, all by hand. The Colonna ring, for instance, has been carefully embellished with brilliant-cut-diamonds and gold citrines, and now glints seductively in all its glory. Now only one more step remains until the ring reaches its true calling.

But this last stage of its journey is not a matter for the goldsmith. How the ring ends up on the right finger is a different story — a story as unique and wonderful as the person lucky enough to receive it.