What Does Real Gold Look Like

Fool s gold can be mistaken for placer gold gold found as rounded or flat nuggets in dry and wet stream beds and rivers or creeks because they both look golden.

What does real gold look like. Fool s gold is made up of crystals and has sharp edges while real gold is a metal with a smoother texture and rounder edges. Most types of fake gold may look shinier or duller in different lights and may appear almost silver at times. A copper penny and a tiny gold nugget on a black streak plate with a small streak made by the nugget. The environmental protection agency says that gold is commonly alloyed with silver and other metals.

In fact the piece with gold colored particles inside may even be lighter than your other piece of quartz if the gold is not real. Gold ore can look like quartz with streaks or spotty areas of gold. I am using a light source to show the difference between gold which shines and pyrite which sparkles. This sheen will not change regardless of what light it is in.

If you look at this picture you will see a gold ring next a couple of different kinds of gold naturally occurring in their rock. Real gold weighs about 1 5 times more than fool s gold or iron pyrite. Most people have no idea what to look for and even if they do find gold they might throw it out accidentally. Gold panning whether it s professional or recreational is supposed to yield gold flakes and nuggets washed out of the soil.

The tiny nugget weighs 0 0035 troy ounce and at a gold price of 1200 ozt the nugget if it were pure gold would have a gold value of 4 20. Gold can look many different ways in nature but it is important to know the difference between gold and the other minerals. Real gold particularly when it is in nugget form has a yellow almost waxy sheen. So indicators of the presence of sulfides like arsenic copper iron and silver may also appear within gold ore.

Fool s gold and other minerals that look like gold will not produce a weight difference between the pieces of quartz. If you look closely at the piece and see that its structure consists of what looks like small and sharp cubes then it is fool s gold. However just because it looks like gold and is in the same place as gold doesn t mean that it s gold. But real gold stays bright even when out of direct sunlight and though soft does not fall apart when you touch it like fool s gold can.

Once you have seen a few pictures of real gold it is pretty easy to distinguish from the other stuff. Fake gold actually is often shinier than real gold.