figures published by the World Gold Council in its Q1 2026 *Gold Demand Trends* report, sourced directly from ICE Benchmark Administration / LBMA data¹.

What recasting / refurbishing gold actually is (and what it absolutely is not).

Recasting means we take your existing gold jewelry (rings, pendants, that thing your aunt left you) and we melt it down in our atelier. From that molten gold, we cast a brand new creation that you helped design as a custom creation. Or maybe you picked an existing design from our made to order section to be  cast in gold. In both ways we can help you with this. 

This is not gold plating. Plating is a thin cosmetic layer of gold over a cheaper base metal, and we'll get into why we will never do that to you later in this post.

Recasting is the opposite of plating. The whole piece becomes solid gold of the same karat. The old shape disappears. The new one exists because the old one did. It's reincarnation, basically, but with a torch and a crucible instead of a soul wheel.

Who this is actually for.

Lovelies, this is honest. We didn't invent this option because we needed a marketing angle. We made this option visible because:

1. Real gold is at historic prices. The World Gold Council reports global gold jewellery demand fell 23% year-over-year in Q1 2026 because high prices have priced people out². That's a lot of dearies staring at empty ring fingers.

2. Most of you have something already. A grandparent's wedding band that doesn't fit your life. A promise ring from your ex. A small inheritance that's been sitting in a drawer for years because you weren't going to wear that.

3. You deserve a real gold heirloom and we want to find ways to get you there.

And (and this is important) you are absolutely not the first person to call your family and ask if they have any old gold lying around. This is one of the oldest practices in goldsmithing. We have been melting and recasting gold for thousands of years. Nothing about this is shameful. It is, if anything, beautifully traditional.

How it actually works in our atelier

1. You send us photos
You DM us or email info@wolfstone.nl with photos of what you want to recast. We need to see it. That tells us roughly the karat, the weight, the condition, and whether it has stones we'd need to remove first.

2. We talk about your new creation
You tell us what you want to make. We design. We send a 3D digital design back. You react. We adjust. This is the same process as any of our custom work or made to order proces. your old gold just becomes part of the material brief.

3. We assess your gold
When the gold physically reaches our atelier we test it, ideally when you are there with us. We need to know the karat and the weight we are working with. Per the Nederlandse Waarborgwet 1986, gold sold in the Netherlands above 1 gram must carry a verified hallmark, and the legal minimum to even be called Gold is 585/1000 (14 karat)³⁻⁴. That's not a vibe. That's law. So we have to know exactly what we're working with before we melt anything.

4. We melt and cast
Kaat handles the full design phase of this new creation and Huib does the alloying work and the casting work plus all the preparations for the cast.  And then in our lovely atelier we cast the new creation. Then it's filing, sanding, stone-setting (if applicable), polishing, and engraving by hand. The same atelier work we do for everything else.

Now the part nobody tells you: recasting is NOT the easiest thing in the world

This is where we differ from goldsmiths who'll just say "yeah sure, send your gold!" and not warn you about what's coming. Buckle in.

When you melt down old jewelry and try to cast it as-is, the chance is that end up with a creation that is porous and brittle. This isn't a goldsmith opinion, it's metallurgy.

When metal is molten, it dissolves gases (especially hydrogen and oxygen) from the atmosphere. The amount of gas it absorbs follows Sieverts' law, where the amount of dissolved gas is proportional to the square root of the gas's partial pressure⁶. The hotter and longer the melt, the more gas. When the metal cools and solidifies, those gases come back out. And if they can't escape, they get trapped as tiny voids inside the metal. That's gas porosity.

Old jewelry brings extra problems in: old solder joints, surface oxides, polishing compound residues, microscopic contamination. All of these decompose at melting temperatures and release more gas, or leave behind hard inclusions that act as crack starters in the finished piece⁶⁻⁷.

So what we do (and what any honest goldsmith working with recycled gold has to do) is mix your old gold with a percentage of clean recycled casting grain from our wholesaler, of the same karat. This restores the alloy's flow characteristics, dilutes contaminants, and lets the metal cast properly without micro-cracks. Industry casting science confirms that scrap-only melts are a leading cause of casting defects, and that using fresh, verified alloy alongside scrap dramatically improves results⁶⁻⁷. Ofcourse we will use some cleaning solution for your old gold but it sometimes is not enough and it has to be cleant professionally. 

This means: your finished creation will not be 100% your grandmother's ring. It will be majority your grandmother's ring, mixed with new clean gold of the exact same karat. Emotionally, the piece is still hers. Metallurgically, we made it survivable.

What we can and cannot recast

We can recast: solid items. Rings, pendants, signet pieces, solid earrings, solid bracelet links if they're chunky. Anything where the body of the piece is one solid block of gold.

We cannot easily recast: necklace and bracelet chains. Chains contain enormous amounts of solder at every link. Solder is a different alloy with a lower melting point and different metals in it (often including small amounts of cadmium or zinc historically). When you melt a chain, you end up with gold plus solder plus whatever the chain used as flux, and the resulting cast comes out brittle and unpredictable. We don't promise things we can't deliver, so chains are usually a no from us for recasting purposes. (We'll tell you what to do with them instead, keep reading.)

White gold, nickel, and EU law

White gold gets its color from being alloyed with white metals. Historically, that was nickel. And nickel is a problem.

Under EU REACH Regulation (EC) No 1907/2006, Annex XVII, Entry 27, nickel cannot be used in any jewelry intended for direct and prolonged skin contact unless the rate of nickel release is less than 0.5 μg/cm² per week, and less than 0.2 μg/cm²/week for items inserted into pierced parts of the body⁸⁻⁹. Compliance is measured by the official test method EN 1811:2023, published by the European Committee for Standardization and harmonized under REACH by the European Commission in December 2023⁹.

The reason this law exists: roughly 10% of the population in Western Europe and North America is sensitized to nickel, and nickel is one of the most common causes of allergic contact dermatitis worldwide¹⁰.

So when someone sends us old white gold and we don't know its composition, we test before melting. If it's a nickel-heavy alloy, we will not recycle it. We won't put a creation back on the market that violates EU law or risks giving someone a chronic rash. We'd rather lose the job. White gold from EU sources after roughly the mid-2000s is increasingly palladium-alloyed and usually fine, but we test, not assume.

The real risk: pre-1980 gold and gold from outside the EU

Now we have to be honest about the worst-case scenario, because we've lived it.

Gold from before approximately 1980, and gold from outside the EU at any age, can contain alloy ingredients that are essentially untraceable (for us). Older industrial practices, hallmark systems that allowed wider tolerances, and unregulated regions all created gold pieces whose alloys we cannot identify with our atelier equipment. (Note: even modern EU hallmark systems allow for small negative tolerances, for example, until very recently certain jurisdictions permitted soldered 18K items to read as low as 743/1000 in actual fineness and still be marked as 750¹¹. So even with a hallmark, real fineness can drift.)

We will try to recast difficult gold three times. If after three attempts the material still casts brittle ( which sometimes happens ) we have to send it to a professional gold refining company. They strip the alloy back to pure 24K (999/1000) gold and return that to us. Then we have to re-alloy it back up to 14K or 18K by adding measured amounts of clean alloying metals.

This adds a real cost: roughly €500 to €750 on top of the original quote.

That's why we always discuss this risk with you up front, in writing, before any melt happens. You don't get a surprise invoice. You get a calculated, honest worst-case scenario, and you decide if you want to proceed knowing what could happen.

"There's another option" the gold exchange office route

If your old gold collection is *full* of stuff that's pre-1970 or pre-1980, or full of chains and bracelets we can't melt cleanly, here is the honest second option:

Take it to a reputable gold exchange office (goudwisselkantoor). They will weigh and assay your gold and pay you out at a fair percentage of the current spot price. Right now, with the LBMA gold price where it is, that payout is the highest it has been in modern history¹.

Then you take that money.  and you commission a clean, fresh-gold creation with us using what you earned from the gold exchange office. If we have a custom commission running we also offer you to come over to us and to test the gold and offer you the value you should/could get from the exchange office, so you  can get there with a bit more confidence. 

You lose the emotional connection to the specific metal. You don't lose the gold itself. The value moves with you.

This is not us trying to lose business. This is us trying to give you the option that actually serves your situation. Sometimes recasting is the right answer. Sometimes selling and starting fresh is the right answer. Sometimes a mix is the right answer (sell the chains, recast the rings). We will tell you honestly which we think it is when we see your photos.

The perks of recasting, both real and emotional

The emotional layer

This is where recasting becomes something nothing else can replicate. Your new creation is literally carrying the material your grandmother wore at her wedding. Your divorce ring becomes the start of a new chapter: same atoms, completely transformed shape. The gold from a relationship that ended becomes the foundation of a creation that's only about you.

This is what people mean when they say jewelry holds memory. The metal genuinely does. There are physical atoms in your new piece that touched the skin of a person you loved. We don't say that lightly.

The financial layer

Recasting is more affordable than starting with all-new gold, because gold is by far the biggest cost in a creation. Our pricing structure puts the gold material investment alone at roughly €1,935 to €2,580 for a typical 9–12 gram 14K yellow gold piece at current rates. If 40–50% of your gold weight comes from your own old jewelry, that's a meaningful reduction.

But, and we have to be very clear about this, recasting will not move mountains. Gold has not been cheap since the Bronze Age. The labor of designing, casting, hand-finishing, stone-setting, and hallmarking your creation is real labor and we charge for it honestly. So a recast creation is more accessible than a fully fresh-gold creation. It is not, and will never be, "cheap."

And here's our position on that, because we want to be unambiguous:

Cheap is not a value. Cheap is not something you deserve. You deserve something that is worthy.

That sentence is the heart of everything we make here.

Why we will never offer gold plating instead

We get asked this a lot. "Can you just gold-plate my silver piece so it's cheaper than solid gold?"  No. And here's the data.

Under US Federal Trade Commission Jewelry Guides, the minimum thickness for a piece to be legally labeled as gold vermeil is 2.5 microns of at least 10K gold over sterling silver¹². For context: one micron is one one-thousandth of a millimeter. A human hair is roughly 70 microns thick.

Standard fashion gold plating? Often 0.175 to 0.5 microns¹². So roughly five to fourteen times thinner than the legal minimum to even be called vermeil. That kind of plating wears through within weeks to months of normal wear, especially on ring shanks, clasps, and edges that see friction.

If we were to do a high-quality vermeil-thickness gold plating on one of our sterling silver creations, the cost to do it properly, with the right karat, the right thickness, the right adhesion. Would average around €350 per creation. We don't want you paying that kind of money for something that, even at premium thickness, has a finite lifespan on its skin contact points.

Solid gold lasts a lifetime. Plating doesn't. We don't sell things that don't last. End of story.

What we'd love from you, if you're considering this

If you have old gold and you're wondering whether recasting is right for you, here's what helps us help you:

1. DM @atelier_wolfstone or email info@wolfstone.nl
2. Send clear photos of every piece you're considering melting. Include the hallmark stamps if you can find them (usually inside ring shanks or on chain clasps, a tiny "585", "750", "14K", "18K", or a country symbol).
3. Tell us what you'd want to make. A vague vibe is fine, "a chunky ring with a black stone," "something to replace my divorce ring," "a pendant that holds my grandma's wedding band somehow"*. We take it from there.
4. Tell us the budget reality. We'll be honest about what is and isn't possible at that number with your gold.

We will tell you straight whether recasting is the right move for you, or whether the gold exchange office route makes more sense, or whether a mix is best. No pressure to commit. No guilt. Just a real conversation.

A small final thought

Recasting gold is one of the most quietly powerful things you can do in a life. You're not buying more. You're transforming what you already have. The atoms of your gold have probably been other things before, coins, religious objects, somebody else's wedding ring two centuries ago. They will be other things after you, too.

We just happen to be the goldsmiths who get to be part of the chapter that's yours.

When you're ready, our DMs are open, dearies. ♡

love, Kaat & Huib
Atelier Wolfstone,  goldsmiths who create for the beautifully unconventional

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