cleaning

Caring for your Jewelry- By Ashley Stone

|Categories: Informational, repair|Tags: Ashley Stone, cleaning, guide, informational|

We hear all the time from our amazing customers that they wear their jewelry out in the garden while doing yard work, washing the dishes, or cleaning with chemicals. We know you love your jewelry, but there are many times you need to take them off. This article is here to educate you on how to properly care for your jewelry!

First, its important to explain that precious metals are all physically soft and can all be effected by chemicals. In addition to caring for the metal in your ring, your stones are typically held in only by a few prongs (tiny pieces of metal which can easily be damaged) and making sure you don’t expose your prongs to too much punishment is very important to keeping your stones secure.

Here are a list of things to do/not do to help you never physically or chemically damage your jewelry.

1. Take jewelry off right when you get home from work, safely placing it on your dresser or nightstand where you will remember each morning to put it back on. Don’t ever sleep with your jewelry on.
2. Do not where your rings/ jewelry while working in the yard. This is fairly self explanatory and will also be useful for keeping your pieces clean.
3. Do not wear your jewelry while doing house work such as cleaning bathrooms, washing dishes, or mopping the floors. The cleaners are often bad for the metal.
4. Don’t swim in your jewelry, the chlorine from the pool will slowly damage your metals.

Of course if your jewelry does get broken, we at Silver City will always be available to repair it for you, but any jewelry piece can only be repaired a certain number of times before it becomes completely ruined. Taking care of your jewelry is very important because we all want our pieces to stay clean and pretty, and last our whole lives!

Thanks for reading 🙂

How to Clean Jewelry

|Categories: Informational, repair|Tags: clean, cleaning, guide, jewelry|

At Silver City we are always happy to offer free jewelry cleaning if you stop by during regular hours. However, if you need to clean your jewelry at home, it’s a simple and easy process. First, get a cleaning solution that works for your metal; gold and platinum use the same cleaner while silver uses a stronger liquid. At Silver City, we sell a few different cleaning solutions for about $7 each.

For gold and platinum, the goal is to remove any dirt or residue that has gotten behind stones or in small openings in the metal, and you’ll want to soak your jewelry in the solution anywhere from 10 minutes to a few hours. It may be helpful to use a toothbrush to brush around the stones. After removing the jewelry from the liquid, inspect it to make sure that you haven’t lost any stones in the cleaning solution, rinse it with water, and dry it off.

For silver pieces, the cleaning solution is much more powerful and designed to quickly remove any tarnish. Dip the silver piece in the cleaner and then take it out after a few seconds, look to see if there is any more tarnish that the cleaner has failed to remove, and if so, then dip it again. If the piece is clean, then rinse it with water. If your sterling piece is now nice and white, but lacks shine, you can use a polishing cloth, which you can buy at Silver City for about $7, to polish the piece until it is nice and shiny.

IMPORTANT-What not to do while cleaning!

Never mix metals in a cleaner! You can clean multiple pieces of gold but never pieces of gold and silver at the same time.

Never let pieces sit in silver cleaner for a long time! The silver cleaning solution is a very mild acid that can harm your jewelry after a few minutes.

Be safe with the chemicals! Make sure to minimize any contact that your skin has directly with the cleaners. They won’t hurt you just by accidently getting on your fingers while dipping your jewelry but prolonged exposure should be avoided. And, like most household cleaners, jewelry cleaner can be harmful if ingested or if it gets in the eyes.

If these cleaning methods fail to achieve the desired results, bring us the piece, and we can professionally polish, steam, and use an ultra-sonic cleaner to make it look brand new.