The first time I stopped dead in front of a display of 9-carat rings in an ordinary jewelry store, it was four or five years ago. A ring I genuinely liked, pretty, at a price that looked like a great deal compared to the 18-carat pieces right next to it. I picked it up, read the label details, and ran into "9k" and "375". I stood there, puzzled: what on earth is this?
Spoiler: it wasn't a great deal. Often, it's the opposite.
"Cheaper", really?
This trend isn't limited to a single brand — Histoire d'Or, Carador, Cleor, for 4 or 5 years now you'll find entire shelves of 9-carat rings, chains and pendants that didn't exist before, or were far more discreet. Today, in some windows, it's almost half the selection.
(An honest note: Manège à Bijoux is the exception, publicly committing to selling only 18-carat — a commercial policy the brand stands by. That's rare in the French mass-market jewelry landscape, and it deserves a mention when you're criticizing the rest.)
When you do your grocery shopping, you look at the price per kilo, not the price on the front of the box. That's how we learned to value what we buy. A 200g box at €4 can be more expensive than a 500g box at €8 — it depends on the price per kilo, not on what's printed big on the packaging.
With jewelry, we've lost that reflex. We look at the label, we compare two rings side by side, we see that the 9-carat one is €150 and the 18-carat one is €250, and we think "look, the 9-carat is cheaper." Except what you're buying, when you buy gold, is gold. And 9-carat doesn't even contain half of it.
Concretely, here is the share of pure gold by fineness:
| Fineness | Pure gold | Hallmark | Where you meet it |
|---|---|---|---|
| 24 carat | 99.9 % | 999 | Bars, certain coins |
| 22 carat | 91.7 % | 916 | India, the Middle East |
| 18 carat | 75 % | 750 | The European reference |
| 14 carat | 58.5 % | 585 | Germany, Northern Europe |
| 9 carat | 37.5 % | 375 | The "cheap" gold spreading fast |
The rest (62.5% in the case of 9-carat) is alloy: copper, silver, zinc, sometimes palladium. These aren't materials with any significant resale value.
What you're really paying
Let's take a real example, verifiable online as I write these lines. Cleor currently offers a yellow 9-carat gold ring set with 12 micro-diamonds (reference D.3122300201, size 54) for €249. Weight of the piece: 1 gram. Spot price of pure gold in late May 2026: €124/g (that's what the API I use on OrOGramme gives me, fresh each day).
So this piece contains 1 × 37.5% = 0.375 gram of pure gold. Per gram of actual gold: 249 / 0.375 = €664 per gram of pure gold, or 5.3 times the spot price.
The store's honest argument: there are micro-diamonds and setting work. Let's be generous and allocate €50 to the stones and labor. That leaves €199 for 0.375 g of gold, or €530 per gram of pure gold — still 4.3 times the spot price.
Now compare to a plain 18-carat ring without stones weighing 2.5 grams in an ordinary store, low end around €350 (Histoire d'Or advertises its 18-carat rings from €200 across 350 models). This ring contains 2.5 × 75% = 1.875 grams of pure gold. Per gram of actual gold: 350 / 1.875 = €187 per gram of pure gold, or 1.5 times spot.
You pay three times more for the gold in 9-carat than in 18-carat. The label says "cheaper"; your wallet says the opposite.
The label says "cheaper" because the sticker price is lower, but your wallet says "much more expensive per gram of actual gold." And the day you resell, the difference shows up in cash.
Resale: where 9-carat really hurts
The buyback price of gold is calculated on the weight of pure gold, full stop. Nobody pays you for the copper alloy.
Now run that calculation in reverse. You bring your 1g Cleor 9-carat ring to a serious gold buyer. They weigh the 1g, apply the 375-thousandths fineness, and pay you for 0.375 g of gold at the day's rate — minus their margin. At 70% of spot (a fair buyback margin), that's about 0.375 × 124 × 0.70 ≈ €33 for a ring you paid €249 for. You recover 13% of what you paid.
The same operation on the plain 18-carat 2.5g ring sold for €350: 1.875 × 124 × 0.70 ≈ €163. You recover 46%. It's more in absolute value, it's more in percentage, and above all you've kept a real store of value that you can resell again in 10 years with a gain if the price rises (which it tends to do over time).
And then there's what nobody tells you: 9-carat tarnishes fast. The high proportion of alloy makes it softer against everyday wear and duller after a few years. My own experience, and what I see in the second-hand shops I list: second-hand 9-carat is rare, and what you do find often has a tired look that puts buyers off.
My 3 personal rules
I'm on the team that really doesn't like this gold. I find it far too blended, that it doesn't have the value of a true store of value, and that it marks enormously. Gold plating wasn't enough — now they make a kind of cheap-ish gold disguised as an investment.
So here are the 3 rules I apply for myself and that I've coded into OrOGramme:
- 18 carat minimum. Below that, I don't even look. If some 22 or 24-carat happens to come through — which is rare for jewelry sold in France — I keep it displayed because it's even better. But in practice, my real target is 18-carat: it's the most common fineness in Europe and the Maghreb, it's solid, it's wearable daily, and it holds its value.
- Look at the price per gram of the piece, not the sticker price. On OrOGramme, that's exactly what I calculate for each product displayed: price divided by the weight of the piece. And that's the criterion I sort by default. This simple calculation is valid because I already filter out everything below 18 carat — so all the pieces compared on the site have the same fineness, and price per gram of the piece is enough to rank them against each other. In a physical store, however, the moment you compare a 9-carat to an 18-carat, that calculation becomes misleading: you have to add a step and multiply by the fineness to get the price per gram of pure gold (the simulation above). That's exactly the two-step reasoning I'd rather spare you by filtering 9-carat out at the source.
- If the store margin exceeds 60% above spot on a plain piece without stones, I walk away. For a love-at-first-sight piece with a stone, fine, I accept it. For pure investment, never.
To go faster: let OrOGramme filter
On OrOGramme, by default I only display jewelry in 18-carat and above, sold by official shops with a physical location that certify their pieces. No C2C, no Vinted, no private Leboncoin — I tried it myself and I no longer even dare get what I bought certified, for fear of finding out I got had.
The default sort is by ascending price per gram of actual gold. So the first result is always the best deal on the metal. You can then filter by style, by shop, by price range.
Eleven French shops of second-hand 18-carat gold, normalized per gram and sorted by the best deal on the metal.
To wrap up
I'm telling you what annoys me as a buyer. 9-carat can make a pretty piece for someone looking for a feel-good gift who accepts that it's not a store of value — it's still gold, and a piece can be beautiful regardless of its fineness. But as investment jewelry, as a heritage gift for a birth, as a safe-haven value to pass on, it's really not the right tool.
It's up to you to draw the line between pleasure-gold and investment-gold. If it's an investment, move up a notch, take 18-carat, and look at the price per gram. And if it's costume jewellery or plating "to save money" that tempts you, I did the maths over thirty years: it's the real gold piece that ends up costing the least.
Sources for the figures cited:
- Cleor 9-carat gold ring, 1g, €249 (reference D.3122300201): cleor.com, accessed 28 May 2026
- 18-carat rings from €200 at Histoire d'Or: histoiredor.com, accessed 28 May 2026
- 24-carat gold spot price €124/g: API used on OrOGramme, late May 2026