The piece below is owned by me, I got an unpainted white and covered it in Palladium* metal leaf

 *Palladium (pal·la·di·um) is a precious metal from the Platinum group, I really wanted to use my favourite metal, Platinum but it became hard to find any due to production problems at the time I wanted it, so I was going to try silver leaf but silver tarnishes and needs a protective coat which I didn't want to do because I may as well have spray painted it with chrome paint instead! I tried white gold leaf but that was a pig to work with so I had Palladium recommended to me which is more expensive than the white gold or silver but not as expensive as Platinum so I tried it and found it to be much better to work with than the white gold and is a much better colour.
Next time I use metal leaf though, I will use it on something without so much fine detail because this took a lot of work and much cursing for such a small piece...