Platinum & Palladium

Palladium Buyers · Houston, TX Palladium Buyer in Houston: The Precious Metal Most Sellers Don’t Know They Own It looks like white gold, weighs less than platinum, and sits unrecognized in thousands of Houston jewelry boxes. Here is how to find yours. Of the four precious metals a palladium buyer in Houston handles, palladium is the one people cannot name. Gold everyone knows. Silver everyone knows. Platinum most people have at least heard of. Palladium gets called “the white one” or written off as stainless steel, which is a costly mistake, because it is a genuine platinum-group metal, jewelry-grade palladium is usually 95% pure, and it sells by weight exactly like the rest. If you got married between roughly 2004 and 2015, there is a real chance one of the bands in your drawer is palladium and you have never once thought of it as valuable. Quick Answer Palladium is stamped PD, PD500, PD950, 500Pd, or 950Pd. It is naturally white so it never needs rhodium plating, it does not tarnish, and it is noticeably lighter in the hand than platinum or gold of the same size. That surprising lightness is the giveaway: a white metal ring that feels too light to be platinum, with a PD mark inside, is palladium, and it carries real precious metal value. Identify It How to Recognize Palladium in Your Own Jewelry Box Start with the stamp. Palladium marks are short and unmistakable once you know them: PD, PD950, 950Pd, PD500, or 500Pd. The number is parts per thousand, so PD950 is 95% pure palladium. Some pieces from the United Kingdom carry a full pictorial hallmark with a Pallas head, since British assay offices began hallmarking palladium in 2010. Then pick it up. This is the part that surprises people. Palladium is roughly half the density of platinum. Hold a palladium band and a platinum band of identical size and the difference is immediate, the palladium feels almost hollow by comparison. It is also lighter than 14k gold. Then look at the color. Palladium is naturally white, a shade slightly darker and cooler than rhodium-plated white gold. It never yellows, never needs replating, and does not tarnish the way silver does. A white metal ring that has stayed exactly the same color for twenty years is not silver and is probably not white gold. Reference Chart Palladium Stamps and the Marks People Confuse Them With Take a magnifying glass to the inside of the band. Almost every white metal in jewelry declares itself if you know the shorthand. Stamp What It Is Precious Metal Content PD999 / 999Pd Fine palladium bullion 99.9% palladium PD950 / 950Pd Standard jewelry palladium 95% palladium PD500 / 500Pd Lower-grade jewelry alloy 50% palladium PLAT / PT950 Platinum, not palladium 95% platinum 14k / 585 / 18k / 750 White gold, often palladium alloyed 58.3% or 75% gold 925 / Sterling Sterling silver 92.5% silver 316L / Stainless Surgical stainless steel None TI / Titanium / Tungsten Contemporary bridal metals None The last two rows are why palladium gets overlooked. Titanium, tungsten, and stainless steel wedding bands were sold alongside palladium in the same display cases during the same years, and they look similar. They have no scrap value. Palladium does. A thirty-second stamp check tells you which one you are holding. “Palladium is the only precious metal people routinely mistake for something worthless. Nobody throws out a gold ring by accident. Palladium gets donated in a shoebox.” The Hidden Palladium Your White Gold Ring Probably Contains Palladium Too Here is something almost no seller knows. Gold is yellow, so making white gold requires alloying it with a whitening metal. For decades that metal was nickel, which caused skin reactions in a meaningful share of wearers. Modern jewelers largely switched to palladium instead, and “palladium white gold” is now the standard for nickel-free bridal jewelry. That does not turn your 14k white gold ring into a palladium piece. It is still valued and sold as gold, at 58.3% or 75% gold content depending on the karat. But it explains something useful: if you have white gold jewelry that has never irritated your skin and has held its color unusually well, palladium is likely part of the reason, and it is a reminder that the white metals in your box are rarely as simple as they look. Palladium itself was identified in 1803 by the English chemist William Hyde Wollaston, who named it after Pallas, an asteroid discovered the year before. It sat as an industrial curiosity for most of two centuries. The Britannica entry on palladium covers its chemistry and discovery in more depth. Supply and Demand Why a Metal Nobody Recognizes Became So Valuable Jewelry is a small slice of palladium demand. The overwhelming majority goes into catalytic converters for gasoline engines, where palladium does the work that platinum does in diesel vehicles. Add electronics, dentistry, and chemical manufacturing, and you have a metal whose price is driven almost entirely by industry rather than adornment. Supply is the other half of the story, and it is tight. Palladium is mined in only a handful of places, with Russia and South Africa dominating global output, and most of it comes out of the ground as a byproduct of nickel or platinum mining rather than from dedicated palladium mines. That combination of concentrated supply and industrial demand has made palladium one of the most volatile precious metals of the last twenty years, at times trading above both gold and platinum, at other times falling well below. The USGS platinum-group metals statistics document how narrow that supply base really is. For a seller, the practical takeaway is simple: never assume palladium is worth little because you have not heard of it, and never assume last year’s price applies today. Get it weighed and priced on the day you sell. One note while we are on the subject of catalytic converters: we buy palladium jewelry, bullion, and scrap, not converters. Removing