Our Guide to Caring for Silver Jewellery
As our range includes a wide range of sterling silver jewellery items, we thought it would be a good idea to include a blog about how best to care for your silver jewellery.
Silver is a stunning metal with the highest electrical conductivity of any other metal in the periodic table. It is a common misconception, however, that sterling silver jewellery is made from pure silver. Silver is incredibly soft in its natural form and not strong or durable enough to be used in jewellery making, so it is made into an alloy with other metals, usually copper. Whilst silver in its natural form is almost completely inert, reacting with the atmosphere extremely slowly over a long period of time, alloyed with copper it becomes more susceptible to chemical reactions with a wide variety of substances, including oxygen.
It is the fact that it is a mixed metal that causes that tarnished look over time. You are presented with a new, dazzling, white shiny ring that starts to dull and turn a greenish colour after a period of long usage. For this reason, producers of sterling silver are always testing and experimenting with different alloys in order to produce a silver that doesn’t tarnish. Thus far, nothing has successfully replaced copper.
The good news is that tarnishing is not a permanent effect and your lovely silver jewellery can be restored to its original lustre with a little care, attention and cleaning. The following steps show you how to care for and clean your silver jewellery to both reduce tarnishing occurring and restoring it once it does occur.
- Never leave your silver jewellery lying around on surfaces, such as the sink edge or around the house. This increases its chances of coming into contact with substances that can accelerate tarnishing.
- Wash regularly with ordinary soap and water and dry with a soft cloth. The cloth supplied in the jewellery cleaner cloth care kit that we supply is perfect for regular cleaning, polishing and gently drying cleansed jewellery.
- Avoid cleaning your silver jewellery with any household cleaners or chemicals unless specifically intended for silver jewellery such as our silver jewellery dip cleaner – an intensive clean-up for restoring already tarnished silver jewellery. Silver dip is one of the fastest and most effective ways to clean heavily tarnished silver jewellery and will leave it looking like new if done well.
- Many people turn to ultrasonic jewellery cleaners to clean up their jewellery – and are disappointed with the results. This is because ultrasonic cleaners remove particles of dirt – they do not have much of an effect on tarnishing, which is a chemical reaction on the metal itself rather than an accumulation of substances. Ultrasonic cleaning is perfect for jewellery inset with gems as it cleans behind them and restores their lustre. For restoring tarnished metal, however, it is almost completely ineffective.
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