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Jewellery care

Silver is a living metal. It reacts with the air, with your skin and with most of what you put on your hands. None of that is a fault, and all of it is manageable. Four habits keep a piece looking the way it did the day it arrived.

The four that matter

  • Keep it away from perfume, hand cream, hairspray and hand sanitiser. Alcohol and cosmetics dull silver and strip gold plating faster than anything else you will touch.
  • Take it off before you sleep or exercise. A ring worn through a night of turning, or through a session at the gym, collects scratches and slowly goes out of round.
  • Take it off before you shower or swim. Soap leaves a film that flattens the shine; chlorine and salt water do worse, and plating dislikes both.
  • Wipe it with a soft dry cloth every so often. That is most of what polishing actually is.

Silver darkens. That is not a defect.

Sterling reacts with sulphur in ordinary air and turns grey, then almost black. It is the same metal underneath. A minute with a silver polishing cloth brings it back. Keeping a piece in the pouch it arrived in, away from humid air, slows it down a great deal.

If your piece has a stone

Lab-created opal holds water inside its structure, so it must never meet an ultrasonic cleaner, hot water or bleach - any of the three can craze it. Cubic zirconia is far tougher and takes warm soapy water without complaint. Either way, a soft brush behind the setting is where hand cream collects.

If your piece is gold-plated

Plating is a surface, not a second metal. It thins first wherever the piece rubs: the underside of a ring, the back of a clasp. Never use a silver dip or a polishing cloth on the gold, because both take the plating off. When it does eventually wear, any jeweller can re-plate it for very little, and we can arrange that for you.

One thing we do not recommend

Silver dip. It works, and it also creeps under stone settings where it cannot be rinsed out, and it removes gold plating on contact. Warm soapy water and a cloth are slower and will not cost you a piece.

How it arrives

Every piece ships in a jewellery box with a protective pouch and a card. The pouch is worth keeping: it is the best place to store the piece between wearings.