Silver alloys, such as sterling silver oxidise with time. This is that dark tarnish which starts to develop around your jewellery if it’s not taken care of properly. Luckily keeping your sterling silver jewellery looking shiny and new is pretty simple! Let us walk you through the best tips for taking care of your cherished pieces.
Best practice when caring for sterling silver jewellery:
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Wear it!
Wearing your sterling silver jewellery actually helps to prevent it from tarnishing and losing shine. This is one of the best (and most enjoyable) ways to protect your silver jewellery from tarnishing! The natural oils in your skin actually work by “cleaning” the sterling silver, helping it maintain brilliance.
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Store it in an airtight bag
When silver comes in contact with oxygen oxidisation occurs, and silver will start to tarnish. Although not the most appealing, when you're not wearing your jewellery, we suggest giving it a polish and storing it in a plastic airtight zip-lock bag. This prevents oxidisation from taking place and tarnish from developing.
However, if your silver does tarnish – no problem! Just jump to the next step!
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Polish and clean
Polishing cloths are a great way at preventing silver from tarnishing and removing tarnish from silver jewellery. While it may make your jewellery look unappealing, oxidised silver is not really a problem and can be easily cleaned.
While cleaning solutions and polishing cloths are easily available, our two-ply polishing cloth contains both an inner cleaning cloth treated with the finest polishing agents that remove and inhibit tarnish, and an outer polishing cloth. Our polishing cloth is made from 100% soft cotton flannel as to not scratch the jewellery. A polishing cloth can be used for gold, silver and platinum to help it maintain its shine. You can purchase our polishing cloth here.
Luckily, our jewellery polishing cloth is also non-toxic, environmentally friendly and doesn’t contain any harsh chemical. All to give you peace of mind when caring for your jewellery.
We included a brief video presentation to show you how simple cleaning your jewellery is with our cloth!
Additional tips:
- Store silver jewellery pieces separately to avoid them knocking against each other and scratching.
- Don’t use materials other than a polishing cloth to clean your jewellery, e.g. toilet paper. These can cause micro scratches on the jewellery. You can however gently wrap your jewellery in toilet paper or tissue before putting in into a ziplock bag for extra protection.
- Leave your silver jewellery at home when going swimming! Whether you’re swimming in the sea or the pool, both salt water and chlorine can cause silver to tarnish.
- Put on your jewellery after applying any perfume, lotions, makeup and other skin products (and once these have dried!).
Additional tips for gold plated jewellery:
We now also offer our beautiful and popular lockets plated in gold. Check them out here! To make sure you keep your jewellery shiny and to prevent the gold plating from wearing off, here’s some care tips for gold plated jewellery:
- You can clean your gold plated jewellery with a plain cloth or cotton ball. It’s important you only use these safe items to clean any plated jewellery (gold-plated, gold vermeil, silver-plated) as due to most silver cleaning cloth's cleansing properties it can cause the gold plating to wear of and as such should NOT be used.
- But do this sparingly, as needed. The gold plating is simply a layer of gold on top of the silver, hence rubbing it too often will cause the gold plating to rub off quicker.
- If needed clean gently with water and mild soap.
We sell high quality, handmade, ethical jewellery. Our customisable lockets allow you to carry a special memory near your heart, while our engravings make your jewellery even more distinctive and special for each individual. We also offer bangles in various sizes, from petite to large to make sure everyone can find the right size to fit their wrist. For all these reasons, we believe our jewellery turns into special and cherished pieces for those who purchase it or receive it as a gift. We all know special things should be preserved. We hope this guide will help you in doing just that.