As time goes by, our jewelry tends to lose brightness and color, and depending on the material of your jewelry, it may tend to blacken or take on a greenish color.
What will you learn by reading the following article?
- Understanding which products you should not apply to your jewelry
- How to easily clean your jewelry with homemade products
- Tips on how to care for your jewelry properly
- Two tips to protect jewelry from rust
- 🚀 BONUS: A magic product that in 2 minutes makes your jewelry as good as new.
In By Lia we wanted to give you the best recommendation, so we have tested each of the cleaning processes to recommend the most effective ways to restore the brightness of your jewelry, remove the blackish color or remove the oxide if they had it.
Which products not to use for cleaning jewelry
It is important to clarify that many people show homemade formulas and recipes such as the use of Coca Cola, toothpaste or eye makeup remover, but the first tip we give you is NOT TO USE any of these products as they can be abrasive on certain materials, and although they can remove the black color, they can also take away the shine due to the friction they can cause on your jewelry.
Products such as toothpaste can cause an abrasive and corrosive effect on these materials, producing a great wear and polishing our costume jewelry, leaving a dull result that is not desired when we want to clean the jewelry and leave it shiny as new.
We have seen that several people use these products and have not had any problems, but we prefer not to use them as there are other less intrusive and more efficient products.
How to clean silver, gold and steel jewelry
But after several tests, these are the 3 most efficient methods to clean your jewelry. First of all, we recommend you to prepare your space.
What do we need for jewelry cleaning?
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Find a container to hold all your jewelry
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Stiff bristled brush or toothbrush
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Cloth or piece of cloth in disuse
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Heat water to about 70º degrees (before boiling).
- Aluminum foil depending on the method you choose
The following depending on the method we choose:
What can we do to prevent jewelry from turning black?
Before knowing the methods to clean jewelry, it is very important to understand how to prevent this from happening in order to prevent our jewelry from turning black.
Be careful with cosmetic products:
Makeup, perfume and creams can cause this effect. We therefore recommend that you put on the jewelry once the products have been absorbed.
Do not do sports with jewelry on:
Perspiration is very harmful to some materials such as silver, so we recommend that you remove all jewelry before training.
Don't sleep with jewelry on:
If you find that the PH of your skin does not stain the jewelry, you can leave this advice aside, but otherwise we advise you to remove the jewelry to sleep.
Use a jewelry box to care for and protect your jewelry:
This helps to prevent humidity and temperature changes, so that when you wear your jewelry it is always in perfect condition.
How to clean blackened or oxidized costume jewelry
Now we are going to explain 3 ways to clean costume jewelry with 2 homemade tricks and with a chemical product that we have tested in our own products.
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Cleaning your jewelry with baking soda
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Cleaning your jewelry with vinegar + baking soda
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Liquid jewelry cleaning product
If your jewelry is heavily blackened or oxidized, we recommend using method number 2, which is more effective.
Cleaning jewelry with baking soda
First step: Heat water
Heat water in a pot and remove from heat before it boils.
Step 2: Cover a container with aluminum foil.
Take a flat-bottomed container such as a pot and line it with aluminum foil.
Third step: Insert our jewelry in the container.
Relatively separated from each other and cover with baking soda on top.
Fourth step: Introduce the hot water
In the container where we have the jewels we introduce the year and add two more tablespoons of baking soda on top.
Fifth step: Leave on for 10-15 minutes without touching.
During these 10 to 15 minutes the baking soda will work its magic on our jewelry so we must be patient.
Sixth step: Rub our parts with a toothbrush.
One at a time on our own hand and dry with kitchen paper. You will see that the paper is black. Repeat until we see that the piece recovers the color and the paper is not dirty.
Seventh step: Dry the piece
With a cloth (lens cloth) or a piece of old cloth.
Cleaning costume jewelry with vinegar and baking soda
This trick is infallible and even serves to remove rust and recover 100% of the parts. It is very similar to the first one with some differences in the preparation.
- First step: heat water to boiling point and remove from heat before boiling.
- Second step: In the same pot that we heated the water, we introduce half a cup of baking soda.
- Third step: Once the baking soda is in, add half a cup of alcohol vinegar and you will see that the water begins to effervesce.
- Fourth step: When we see that the preparation begins to produce bubbles, we throw the jewels into the container and stir gently to mix everything.
- Fifth step: Let stand for 15 minutes.
- Sixth step: One by one, we will take our pieces and rub them with a toothbrush, then dry them with a paper towel and let them rest on a dry cloth.
- Seventh step: Rub each piece with a cloth (lens cloth) or a piece of cloth to make it shine again.
- And that's it!
Product for cleaning silver and gold jewelry
As we anticipated in the intro of the article, we are going to show you a product that we have tested and found to be miraculous.
This is a silver jewelry cleaner made in England that will leave your jewelry looking like new. Comes with immersion basket, cleaning brush and silver polishing cloth.
Pros? It is instantaneous and within 2 minutes of application the job is done for silver jewelry, 1 minute for gold plated 925 Sterling Silver jewelry.
It is important to note that for gold-plated jewelry, the application should be less, otherwise the plating may be lost.
Cons? The price is a bit expensive, as it costs 27,90€.
Customer reviews on Amazon?
These are some of the comments left about this silver jewelry cleaner.
By Lia's opinion about the jewelry cleaning product?
We recommend having it for reviving silver jewelry, but not for routine use on all of our jewelry.
We believe it is better to extend the life of our jewelry by using the neutral soap method as a "regular" cleaner, the baking soda method to clean blackened and oxidized jewelry and this last product as a specific method for silver and gold jewelry, but not as a regular one.
How to clean costume jewelry on a regular basis
The truth is that it is difficult to prevent jewelry from darkening because the contact with our skin, depending on our PH and the time of exposure will make our jewelry turn black or greenish, and may even dye our skin.
The first product that we can try and that is available to everyone is neutral soap with warm water. We make this first recommendation in case you do not have any of the 3 products that we are going to recommend below. 3 products that we are going to recommend next,
We mainly recommend using neutral soap and warm water as a method for the routine care of our jewelry. Do this routine from time to time to keep them in good condition and remove traces of PH that our skin can leave on them.
Here we recommend to let the jewelry stand in a bowl of warm water for 10 minutes and then change the water. Reintroduce lukewarm water, rub a stiff bristle brush with the soap and then with the soapy bristles go over our jewelry in circles. Take each piece one by one and rub it individually.
You will notice that the soapy water turns from white to black, so repeat the process 2 or 3 times until the water is no longer colored. Then dry the jewelry one by one with a cloth and let it rest on a piece of cloth to dry completely.
How to care for, protect and polish jewelry
A trick that we have been taught is, once we have done the cleaning process we mentioned before, to let them dry overnight in contact with fresh air and then use Vaseline to protect them.
Protect and shine our jewelry
We put a little bit of petroleum jelly on our fingers and gently rub the pieces one by one leaving a thin layer on the surface. You will see how the jewels recover shine, nourish and protect sensitive parts such as the metal clasps of earrings, necklaces or bracelets.
Once we have coated all the jewelry with Vaseline, we let the jewelry sit again for half a day or overnight on a piece of dry cloth and then we put them back in our jewelry boxes.
It is important to use jewelry boxes where the pieces have their place and space because if we mix all the jewelry in a drawer or a box and the different materials (silver, gold, gold plated 925 silver, brass, etc.) come into contact with each other, they can be affected and cause negative effects.
Protecting our jewelry with delicate chains
Many people recommend the use of clear nail polish to protect costume jewelry with chains or delicate metal clasps. We haven't tried it yet, but if you have, we encourage you to tell us about your experience!
Remember that this is only a guide and that the most important thing is to choose earrings that you like and feel comfortable with.
There are several types of face shapes, and certain types of earrings look best on each shape.
That's as far as we've come today and we hope you find it useful!