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Cleaning Jewellery - Is It Harmless To Clean Up Your Delicate Jewellery?
Please note: If in doubt about cleaning your jewellery seek advice from a specialist brighton jeweller.
When jewellery is worn, it becomes coated in an oily debris that is primarily composed of dead skin cells, dirt and grit. A greasy film will also begin to coat the backs of stones and inside settings if you wear jewellery while washing up, so the main purpose of cleaning jewellery is to remove all this greasy particles.
Here are a few ideas and easy methods to clean different types of jewellery:
Gold Jewellery: You can use an old toothbrush with some warm water and soap to clean your gold jewellery.
Gold Alloys: High carat alloys like 18 carat and over, will not usually become tarnished, and will not be harmed by household chemicals. However, lower carat gold could be harmed by contact with chlorine based bleach and cleaning chemicals. Chlorine can cause stress corrosion cracking in lower gold alloys of 14 carat and below, although it will be even worse if the jewellery contains porosity through less than perfect manufacturing treatments. Because of this it is best to avoid cleaning your jewellery with chlorine bleach or other detergents that contains chlorine, and to avoid putting it on while in contact with bleach.
Diamonds: Unless you rub two of your diamonds together, it will be pretty difficult to scratch or harm them. Hence, as with gold jewellery the good old toothbrush and warm soapy water will do. A word of caution is that if you are using a cloth, at times the synthetic thread may bend the claws which hold the stones and can loosen them.
Silver: While cleaning silver jewellery, Silver tarnishes quickly therefore solutions such as Goddard's Silver Dip may be used and the tarnish will come off quickly.
Platinum: Platinum is extremely resistant to tarnishing like high carat gold alloys and so could be cleaned using chemical substances.
It is always advisable to pop down to any local jewellers in brighton and seek professional advice if you are uncertain whether your cleaning method will cause damage to your jewellery.
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