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Cleaning Precious Jewelry

Ways to Keep Your Jewelry Sparkling and Bright

When you set your precious metal jewelry pieces out to sell, you want them to sparkle. This article addresses various ways how to keep the metal parts of your jewelry in mint condition.

Pure gold and silver do not tarnish, but, by themselves, are too soft to form into jewelry. How quickly your precious metal jewelry tarnishes depends on the content of tarnishable metals used to harden the metal.

If tarnish is not severe, dip the piece in warm soapy water (dishwashing liquid works well) with a few drops of ammonia added. Brush with a baby’s toothbrush and rinse under running water.

When water is not available (like at a show), use a jeweler’s polishing cloth. The two-part ones are nice.

One part is impregnated with cleaning rouge and the other is for buffing. A more economical approach is to take a soft rag, rub a few streaks of red jeweler’s rouge stick on the cloth and rub away.

If your pieces are very intricate or you want to avoid all the manual labor, you may want to invest in a Dremel tool, Ionic Jewelry Cleaner or Rotary Tumbler to polish your work.

For silver jewelry, you can avoid the whole tarnish issue by searching out argentium silver, which is real sterling silver with germanium added. The germanium forms an invisible film on the surface of silver alloy.

This film prevents oxygen from reaching any tarnishable metals, such as copper, employed to harden the pure silver.

Cleaning Your Precious Metal Jewelry Using a Dremel Tool

If you want to avoid the manual labor of hand polishing your precious metal jewelry, you can use a Dremel tool, ionic cleaner and/or tumbler.

If you’re a crafter of any type and don’t yet have a dremel tool, I have to ask, “Why not?!”

Dremels are simply one of the most versatile and handy tools on the market. A dremel is a hand-held rotary tool that can drill, grind, cut, sharpen, sand, route, carve, engrave, clean and polish – depending on which attachments and accessories you buy. There are plug-in and cordless models.

You might assume that a battery-driven dremel would not work as well as the plug-in, but you would be wrong. A dremel uses its speed rather than torque to get the job done.

To polish your precious metal jewelry with a dremel, rub a bit of red jeweler’s rouge on a muslin or felt dremel buff. Buff at low speed (5000 RPM). Do not press down. Keep the tool moving.

Even at low speed, the dremel can heat the metal enough to soften it. This can be a good thing if you want to remove surface scratches or pliers’ marks. Rinse well to remove all traces of rouge and dry.

Cleaning Your Precious Metal Jewelry: Ionic Cleaners

Another way to avoid a lot of tedious hand labor to maintain your precious metal jewelry in mint condition, you might consider an ionic jewelry cleaner.

An ionic cleaner uses an electrical charge to clean jewelry. It works very much like an ionic air cleaner.

When you turn it on, a positive charge attaches to any grease or dirt particles on the jewelry’s surface. The positively charged particles are yanked away from the jewelry and sucked onto the negatively charged container.

Your jewelry is suspended in a solution of water and cleaning concentrate (usually 6 parts water to 1 part concentrate) either in a wire basket or suspended by a crocodile clip which comes with the unit. The idea is to expose the maximum surface of your jewelry to the electrical charge.

The concentrate is composed of chemicals which lower the water’s natural resistance to electricity and make it more conductive, thus speeding the cleaning process.

Once you understand how an ionic jewelry cleaner works, you understand why it works so quickly. Lightly tarnished pieces take only ten seconds. You rarely need to clean an item longer than 30 seconds. Lift the piece or basket up every five to ten seconds to check.

Remove, rinse and dry. What could be easier?

Cleaning Your Precious Metal Jewelry: Tumblers

Rotary or vibratory tumblers polish metal and some gems using cleaning agents and abrasives. The abrasive particles work much like hand polishing with red jeweler’s rouge and a cloth.

Instead of red rouge in stick form, tumblers use red rouge powder along with steel shot pellets, sawdust, plastic pellets, ground walnut shells or cork granules – for example.

Tumblers are the most mechanical of jewelry cleaning methods and tumbling should not be used for emeralds, pearls, shell cameos, beads or opals.

Slightly harder stones like turquoise, rhodonite and malachite can be tumbled – but carefully. Check them every five minutes and limit tumble time to 15 minutes total.

Tumblers should not be used for set stones (as opposed to wire-wrapped stones) since the tumbling action could loosen the settings. Never use a tumbler barrel that has been used to polish rocks for your finished jewelry. Traces of grit cannot be removed from the barrel and will scratch precious metal and gemstones.

With all these cautions and warnings, you might wonder why anyone would decide to tumble their precious metal jewelry and gems. Simply because you can’t match the shine and brilliance achieved with a tumbler any other way.

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I read your article about ionic jewelry cleaners and am quite interested but I heard that they can loosen or damage stones. Or did you mean they can only be used for metal jewelry?

Now that I look back, I see that your title was “Cleaning Your Precious Metal Jewelry.” I’d really like to order one but want to make sure it is safe.

Thanks

Pat

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Good question. I should have mentioned gemstones.

I think you may have ionic cleaners confused with ultrasound jewelry cleaners. Ultrasound cleaners use vibration to clean jewelry. Vibration can loosen and damage stones at the same time it is loosening and rinsing away dirt.

Ionic jewelry cleaners use electrical charges to suck away dirt and grime. There is no vibration. There are no abrasive materials or solvents that could damage stones.

The concentrate used to make the cleaning solution contains nothing but degreasers and chemicals to increase the water’s conductivity.

Even stones that need special care when cleaned by hand can go into an ionic cleaner. It will not dissolve the oil or resin used to fill natural cracks in emeralds.

It is especially good for delicate opals, because they crave water. If allowed to dry out, opals chip easily.

Pearls are safe in an ionic cleaner because there is no vibration that would chip them; nor are there harsh chemicals that would discolor them.

And of course, an ionic cleaner works wonders on the harder stones: diamonds, cubic zirconia, amethysts, peridots, rubies, sapphires and tanzanites – to name just a few. An ionic cleaner actually sucks dirt and grease from under set stones allowing light to shine through and reveal all the facets again.

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