Gold Smart Blog

This year’s Milan Design Week took place April 9-14 and London based interior design company YourStudio put together a list of current hot trends in the design world.

Fat Shapes are In: The trendy design in furniture is well filled out “fat” shapes. Look for extra volume or even puffiness to follow this fashion trend.

Natural Colors and Materials: While naturalness has always been a part of interior design, the trend is to bring even more natural materials into designs. Some examples included using loofah sponge for seating padding and natural, untreated wood.

Neapolitan Colors: Think of pastel colors that make you think of ice cream. These colors were trendy in the 1980′s and are making a comeback.

More Green Plants and Foliage: Integrating more greenery into interiors is another trend to bring a little more of the outdoors into your inside space. Room dividers full of plants and min-jungles are part of this movement.

If you would like to include one or more of these new design trends into your interior space, think about selling some gold to get the money rather than loading up the credit card and making payments every month. Turn some of your unused gold items into modern, trendy interior design upgrades.

Taking everyday items and blinging them up with the addition of precious metals and jewels seems to be a growing trend. This week an article on the tech-focused Wired website highlights the products of a company that gives you a pretty wide choice of set-yourself-apart-from-the-crowd personal electronic devices.

An U.K. based company called Amosu Couture offers a broad lineup of enhanced personal electronics products featuring 18k gold cases and Swarovski crystal gems. Besides the very popular iPhone, the company offers upscale smartphones in Samsung and Blackberry models. The latter becomes more of a “Goldberry”.

Besides several choices of smartphones, the offerings include gold plated with Swarovski logo’d iPads, iPods and you can even get an Amazon Kindle with the gold cladding.

Prices start at £699 or about $1,050 for the golden iPod. A Kindle runs £999 or $1,500. The more advanced and loaded with more gold and gems smartphones and iPad are price around £3,000 or $4,500 at the current pound to U.S. dollar exchange rate.

Although it may be hard to justify spending close to $5,000 on an iPhone or Blackberry, these products are very attractive and for someone who can afford the prices, it is definitely a way to add some gold to your everyday life.

Are you looking for something a little different than the usual jewellery for that next special occasion? Consider a gold flake tattoo. You can pick up a temporary tattoo that will give you the look of an inked up – gold ink – movie star.

Late last year Christian Dior introduced a line of temporary gold tattoos made from 24k gold leaf. The body art designs include chains, bracelets, rings and charms. The tattoos were designed to mimic some of Dior’s regular jewellery designs.

It seems even the celebrities are getting tired of permanent tattoos and many are using temporary skin art to show their style when out in public. Other companies beside Dior also offer gold and other colors of temporary tattoos.

The Dior temporary 24k gold tattoos are priced at $120 U.S. per set. According to various sources, that price is at the low end of the range for a chance to do yourself up like a Hollywood star.

Mother’s Day is approaching and for much of the world, the day of moms is the second Sunday in May, falling on the 12th of May this year. However, there are quite a few places that celebrate Mother’s Day on another day the year. We will skip those that have already passed for 2013 and list some places where the holiday falls in May but on a different date.

• First Sunday in May: Portugal, Spain, Hungary and Lithuania.
• 8 May: Parent’s Day in South Korea
• 10 May: Mexico, Belize, Guatemala and El Salvador
• 15 May: Paraguay
• 26 May: Poland
• 27 May: Bolivia
• Last Sunday in May: France, Sweden, Algeria and Morocco

That covers all of the odd date Mother’s days for this month. Of course there are countries where moms are honoured at a completely different time of the year. The United Kingdom celebrates Mothering Sunday on the fourth Sunday in Lent – which is sometime in March. In Argentina, where they always try to be different, Mother’s Day is the first Sunday in October.

So if you or your mother needs to be honoured at some point in the next few weeks, make a note in the calendar and plan something special. If you cannot be with mom on Mother’s Day, make a date for 15 May and tell her, “It’s Mother’s Day in Paraguay and I wanted to do something special this year!”.

Gold is great for jewellery, on your watch, or even possibly as a case for your iPhone. But there has to be a limit somewhere what should be made out of gold. It can be fun to see what type of everyday items one can find, except that they are made of gold.

First up on this short list of interesting items is a 14k gold book mark. For about $300 you can buy a clip-in gold book mark to keep place in your favorite $8 paperback book. A precious metal book marker seems like a dangerous purchase. The paper ones are very adept at getting lost several times a week and you are always digging in the nightstand drawer for another to mark your place before turning in for the night. Maybe a 14k gold bookmark would stick in your mind and be harder to lose. The golden option might save all that time spent looking for something to mark your spot or even save some books from the torture of a turned-down corner.

The second gold item for those who like to show extravagant bad taste is a gold toothpick. For about $200 you can get one in 14k gold that matches the shape of the wooden ones that cost $1.00 to get 50. Add another $50 or $100 and your dental digging tool comes with your initial mounted on the thick end. So if you want to dig around for that stuck piece of chicken in style, consider a gold toothpick.

Do not think of these items as an inexpensive way to buy a useful implement and get a bit of gold investment too. With 14k gold and the size of a toothpick or book marker, the actual value of the gold will be about 20 percent of the retail price.

The Emile Chouriet Gold Wings watch uses its wings to take luxury on the wrist to another level.

Swiss timepiece manufacturer Emile Chouriet produces a distinctive, high luxury watch or two each year and the Gold Wings model from 2009 is quite literally dripping with gold and diamonds.

The wings in the Gold Wings name appears to be referenced from the two wings at the top and bottom of the watch extending to connect the black alligator strap. The watch body consists of 18 karat gold and the face is surrounded by 268 diamonds with a total weight of over 1.9 karats. The time keeping hands are also 18K gold. Despite the seeming overload of precious metal and jewels, the watch looks striking and elegant rather than the over-the-top gaudy you might expect.

The watch is not all just good looks with an ETA 7001 automatic movement and sapphire crystals on the front and on the back. Flip this watch over and watch the fine machinery if you get an overload of looking at the gold and diamonds. The Gold Wings watch is also water resistant to 30 meters so you can keep it on at the local pool or beach. If you would dare!

The Gold Wings is not currently listed on the Emile Chouriet website, so it appears the watch was an exclusive for 2009. No price can be found anywhere on the web – or at least on the first few hundred Google search results. It seems that the rich and lucky buyers of  Emile Chouriet Gold Wings watches that were produced plan to hang on to them or to find one you need to book a ticket to Switzerland and start prowling the finest watch shops.

Located an hour north of Chicago in the town of Wadsworth, Illinois, a golden pyramid shaped home owned by Jim and Linda Onan is a monument to the couples fascination of all things ancient Egyptian as well as showing what can be done with a very large amount of 24 carat gold foil. The five words the family uses to describe their very unique dwelling are: “Power, Gold, Mystery, Exotic, and Impressive.”

The gold-plated pyramid house has six floors with total area of 17,000 square feet – 1,580 square meters. The ground floor is an exhibition area for an extensive collection of Egyptian items and the family lives on the upper five floors. Also on the grounds of the home are a 55 ft. – 16.8 meters – tall statue of King Tut, an exact replica of the boy king’s tomb, a garage topped by three small pyramids, and a moat that local urban legends claim to be swimming with either crocodiles or sharks. Local newspapers have also reprinted a legend that the moat gets water from a fountain of youth. Jim Onan also had a laboratory analyze beer remains found in an Egyptian tomb and now he brews his own version of the ancient beer using his fountain of youth water.

The idea of a pyramid shaped home started with Jim Onan’s father’s fascination with the 1970′s theories concerning the alleged power of pyramids.  The Onan family lives soon revolved around larger and larger pyramids, leading to the home the family now lives in and any Pharaoh would be jealous of. It is also possible the family cars are fueled by pyramid power, thus the shape of the garage.

The golden pyramid house and estate are open to the public at specified times for a guided tour.