Long story short-this is research for a piece of fiction. Is there any chemical or reaction, even if otherwise pointless, that would achieve this, besides just painting the gold?
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Gold is quite inert, but you can dissolve it, so if you speckled it with Aqua Regia you could make the surface look pitted and worn?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aqua_regia
Pure gold won’t discolor, but alloys of it might depending on the purity and the other metals you used in the alloy.
This is how we get stuff like “Rosegold” (Gold / Copper)
[“Graygold”](https://turgeonraine.com/product/classic-grey-gold-wedding-band/#.Y5ui8n3MLtQ) is probably the closest thing to a real alloy of gold that could look similar-ish to lead.
Plating it. White gold, gray gold, etc is just Rhodium plating.
For your fiction, leafing/gilding is probably a better solution than plating. Leaf transfers with adhesive (gilding) are a fairly easy/inexpensive process. And the leaf thickness could add to the idea that the gold is lead, because lead scratches with a fingernail. You would t want a minor scratch to show gold.
This is sort of the inverse of what you’re asking, but in case is was useful:
Gold sulfide is usually grey or black (wikipedia describes it as “steel-grey”). It has the interesting property that if you heat it to fairly benign temperatures (300 C or so) it spontaneously converts to pure gold plus sulfur.
Sadly, I’m not aware of a way to go from gold to gold sulfide in one step. Two step process: treat with potassium cyanide to make potassium dicyanoaurate, then treat that with hydrogen sulfide. Don’t try this at home; both treatments involve poisonous chemicals.
No.Gold is too chemically inert to produce colourful oxides like aluminium, titanium or arsenic and anything reactive enough to effect gold also dissolves the metal or forms an amalgam like mercury.
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