How Can Titanium Achieve A Hundred Times Its Worth?
Let's start with the conclusion. In terms of titanium, titanium is really not expensive, but when titanium is made into jewelry, it is really expensive!
Let's talk about titanium first, the advantages of titanium are simply not more. First of all, titanium has the characteristics of lightness, skin-friendly color change, and is widely used in many fields such as aerospace, medicine, and navigation. Some internationally renowned jewelry designers such as Wallace Chan (Chen Shiying), Cindy Chao (Zhao Xinqi), Cai Anhe, Liang Dazhao, etc., have also begun to explore titanium jewelry very early, with very stunning titanium jewelry design works. When Chen Shiying used titanium to create, he said: "For me, the material of gold is very limited, and you can't do whatever you want. For example, if I make a work, if it is made of gold material, its weight will be five times that of titanium, and it is too heavy to wear. For this reason, the design can only be changed. At the same volume, the weight of gold and titanium is 5:1. With a lighter skeleton, I can complete more artistic creations as I please.”
Even with such high-quality characteristics, however, titanium has been used in jewelry for the past 20 years. In front of the three giants of gold, silver and platinum, titanium is a complete newcomer in the jewelry industry.
First of all, titanium is not a rare metal, and the content of the earth's crust is 0.42%. What is this concept? The total amount of copper +nickel + lead + zinc is 1/16 of it. From the point of view that rare things are valuable, such common materials should indeed be cheap.
There is only one biggest reason why it is not widely used-the difficulty of smelting.
Titanium has a very high melting point. To make titanium into gorgeous jewelry, it must be smelted under high temperature conditions. However, the chemical properties of titanium at high temperatures will become very active, so the smelting conditions have added another one, that is, it must be carried out under the protection of vacuum or inert gas. Moreover, oxygen-containing materials cannot appear in the smelting process, which requires very high smelting technology and smelting equipment. When Chen Shiying openly shared his research experience on titanium, he said: "Titanium is particularly human. Titanium is the metal closest to the human body. Because of this, it resists when it is fired, and we need to overcome it and communicate with it like a child. It took me six years to explore this technology.”
The price of jewelry is usually determined by design, craftsmanship, and materials. Looking at the price of one of the materials alone is one-sided, and the value of each piece of jewelry is much greater than the price of its materials. However, there are also jewelry companies doing research and development in the direction of titanium. When the technology matures, maybe the price will drop more or less.
