The old making of red gold

That's a terribly written article.
I don't think even the writers know what they were trying to convey.
 
Yes terribly ! As I remember my studies of South American metallurgy was fascinating. Much was destroyed by the Spanish who just wanted gold. But they had techniques we [ in the 1950s ] couldn't understand. Europe's expert in lost wax work ? Cellini said "compared to those in SA ,I know nothing " !!
The specifics of the as I remember was to take a gold copper alloy , etch it in vegetable acid , which removed copper from the surface . Heat it up to drive more copper to the surface , etch again and repeat a number of times . This left a gold rich surface and a gold/copper alloy beneath that ! I was driven to sometimes bluff my way into a few NYC museums , never mentioning I was a HS kid. I was in awe at the techniques that they had but our scientists couldn't figure out !
Do you see now why I became a metallurgist ?
 
That's pretty much it. Dissolve the surface copper in acid, heat to migrate more copper up, etch to dissolve more copper. Each cycle will make the pure gold layer thicker, until you basically have a heavy gold filled piece.

The old "Roman gold" look done in 14K made it look like 18K. It is done in a similar way by etching 14 karat yellow gold in a strong acid and making the surface pure gold. This is only a few millionths of and inch thick, so it would eventually rub off.
 
But, the resultant surface looks like yellow gold, not rose gold.
The circular logic in the article is that rose gold was popular, and then goes into how rose gold was made to look like purer yellow gold!
 
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