Black Diamond White Gold Review
This magnesium carbonite keeps your hands dry without costing an arm and a leg
Price: $11 List | $5.50 at Backcountry
Pros: Widely available, good texture and friction, nice price
Cons: Easy to spill, creates a lot of dust
Manufacturer: Black Diamond
Cons: Easy to spill, creates a lot of dust
Manufacturer: Black Diamond
By Matt Bento ⋅ Senior Review Editor ⋅ Mar 29, 2019
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RELATED: Best Climbing Chalk
Our Verdict
Black Diamond White Gold is a no-nonsense, inexpensive way to get all the chalk you need for your next bouldering road trip or endless training days in the gym. In our humble opinion, White Gold offers a solid combination of performance and value, earning it our Editors' Choice Award. Available in 300g bags, you can pick up a bunch of this stuff all at once and then forget about buying chalk for a long time. With White Gold, you get a random grab bag of textures and chunk sizes, from fine dust to fist-sized chunks. As with all loose chalks, BD White Gold will end up everywhere, coating your pants, the floor, and the inside of your pack with a fine layer of dust, but if you're looking for a cost-effective way to make sure you're never out of chalk, White Gold is a good way to go. If you want to save some cash in the long run, the Super Chalk from Metolius offers the most budget-friendly option of all chalk we tested.
Compare to Similar Products
Our Analysis and Test Results
White Gold is the top choice of several of our testers, citing that it feels "grippier" than Metolius Super Chalk and the Frank Endo chalk blocks and noting that it's much cheaper than Friction Labs Gorilla Grip. However, none of our testers were able to correctly identify White Gold during our blind testing.
Performance Comparison
Not unlike wine connoisseurs, our testers extrapolate on this chalk's subtleties. "Slightly crunchier than Metolius", "The perfect grain", "Good and cakey".
Friction & Overall Feel
Much like the Frank Endo Chalk Blocks, BD White Gold can start out as chunky as you'd like, and breaks down into dust over time in your chalk bag. In its chunkiest form, it leaves a thin layer of chalk dust on your hands every time you dip in the bag. Once it's ground to a powder, you can cake it on thick if that's what you're into.
Testing friction performance with the loose chalk turned out to be pretty inconclusive. Many testers had a bias against Metolius Super Chalk, but when doing a blind comparison on sloper holds in the gym, no one could tell a big difference in performance.
To put in the effort needed for real strength gains, you'll need dry, healthy skin. This chalk will take care of the moisture, and a regular skin care routine will help keep you tips from splitting.
Coverage
The liquid chalk from Mammut and Friction Labs gave us the best coverage, followed by the loose chalks, and then the chalk balls. Among the loose chalks, BD White Gold leaves a thicker layer of chalk on your hands than Gorilla Grip, and about the same as the Metolius Super Chalk and the Endo. So if you need a thick, cakey layer of chalk on your hands to feel confident that you'll stick to the climbing holds, White Gold delivers.
We found we got the best coverage when we combined loose chalk with a liquid chalk base layer. Check out how much chalk was left on our testers hands after three reps of hanging on slopers in the photos below.
Mess
You'll need to take care getting this chalk out the re-sealable plastic packaging and into your chalk bag. The 300g bag has a huge opening, so simply pouring the chalk into your chalk bag will result in chalk spilled on the ground, gym floor, or our case, the trunk of the car. You'll want a scooper of some kind unless you're ok with getting chalk on your hands every time.
300g of chalk could last you a long time, provided you don't constantly spill it everywhere.
Value
This stuff goes for about $1.03 per ounce. While not quite as good a deal as Metolius Super Chalk, it's way cheaper than Friction Labs Chalk and 10 cents per ounce cheaper than Frank Endo. We think its the best compromise of price and performance.
In this photo, what brand of chalk is in his chalk bag is the last thing on our tester's mind.
Conclusion
Black Diamond White Gold doesn't come in consistent sizes and textures like the Friction Labs Chalk, but it's a much better value. Even our more discerning testers couldn't find anything to complain about. If you're lucky enough to climb a lot and go through tons of chalk, White Gold is the Way to go.
— Matt Bento