Jewelry Maintenance
Have your dazzling diamond or precious stones and metal jewelry lost its former shine? Has daily grime and cob webs so to speak accumulated on your favorite jewelry and cause them to look old, dull and spooky! It is important to regularly take your jewelry to a professional jeweler for cleaning and polishing.
Of course, there are things you can do at home to maintain your jewelry. However, these only clean your jewelry to a point.
Cleaning Myths
You’ve probably heard that lemon, dish soap, vinegar, baking soda, toothpaste, or even bleach can be used to clean your jewelry. In truth, only dish soap is safe to use for cleaning, and even then it doesn’t do an effective, thorough job to fully clean and restore your item. Anything stronger than that (such as acidic solutions) can severely damage soft stones such as turquoise, pearls, and coral. Toothpaste may take some tarnish off, but it gets stuck behind settings and hardens to a rock-like consistency and toothpaste is abrasive and can leave scratches on your jewelry
A Professional Cleaning
Professional jewelers have the materials and tools and knowledge to thoroughly clean and preserve jewelry without scratching or damaging it.
A Professional cleaning will involve one or more of the following :
Soaking the jewelry in an ultrasonic jewelry cleaner. The high vibrancy of ultrasonic waves with a chemical cleaning solution dislodges the tiny dirt particles adhering to the metal or gemstones.
Polishing, the jeweler polishes the jewelry with a wheel spinning at high speed. It helps the jeweler to remove all the scratches and abrasions your jewelry has, and restore its original form.
Steam cleaning, when cleaning the whole piece of jewelry, the jeweler typically washes it under a strong blast of steam As abrasive as it sounds, it actually doesn’t hurt your jewelry and can quickly remove stubborn bits of grime and dirt.
Plated jewelry, will go through one additional step. To restore the original look of the item, the jeweler submerges the piece into a plating tank. Electricity runs through the tank, fusing gold or rhodium to the surface of the jewelry.