How to Care for and Clean Your Jewelry

Whether you were gifted jewelry, inherited it,  purchased it, or commissioned something for yourself, you’ll want to care for it so that it retains the same beautiful finish and look it had on the day you got it.

Some background and basics 

If your jewelry is made of silver and hasn’t been worn in a while, it might turn a darker brown to black color. This is called oxidation: the exposure of the surface to oxygen. Oxygen causes steel to rust, silver to tarnish, and brass to patina, and we require it to breathe and stay alive! How crazy is that?

Many people react to metal changing colors when they wear it and blame the metal; however, it’s generally the metal reacting to the wearer and the environment. Your hormones, salinity, acidity, and sweat all interact with the metal, and those interactions can create a dark spot where your jewelry and skin touch.

Often if you wear silver jewelry, your body oils will keep it from tarnishing, but not everyone’s chemistry is compatible with silver. Even if it is, exposure to harsh cleaning products, heat, humidity, and sweat can cause it to react and tarnish. If your body chemistry and silver work well together, regularly wearing the jewelry can actually polish the silver.

Keep in mind too that if you wear your jewelry while swimming in chlorinated or salt water, it will hasten oxidization. Chlorine will also weaken your rings, bracelets, and so on. Salt water can degrade silver and gold, too, with both chlorinated and salt water dulling the luster of silver and yellow as opposed to rose gold, which is especially affected. If you’re not the type to polish your jewelry or want it to keep its gleam, remove the item before entering the water.

This list sounds like a lot of things to avoid, but silver is a nice, everyday metal and has been worn and appreciated since it was first mined in 4000 BCE.

At Shipwreck, we love to work with the oxidation of silver as a design tool. We often apply a solution to darken the metal, allowing it to penetrate the lower levels of its detail and then polish the higher surfaces to create contrast and definition. This shiny mix of blackened and well-polished silver is the basis of rock-and-roll silver style.

Gold is old . . . Well, it’s “Old—er” than silver and dates back to around 4600 BCE, according to finds at the Varna Necropolis in Bulgaria. Pure gold can transfer electric current and doesn’t tarnish, so it has uses in electronics, medicine, and aerospace, as well as jewelry. Generally, 24 karat gold jewelry is very soft, and cultures that wear it are mainly in the Middle and Far East. Most of Europe and Asia opt for 18K gold. The United States wears a lot of 14K. It’s kind of like dark chocolate and milk chocolate: Europe and Asia only consider dark chocolate worth eating and 18k gold worth wearing. The US is fine with milk chocolate and 14K gold.

When you see 10K, 14K, and 18K, it means the gold is alloyed with other metals to make it more durable. Gold can also be alloyed to result in different colors; for example, rose gold is alloyed with copper and silver. With the addition of other metals to gold, it does make it slightly more susceptible to tarnish. The lower the karat, the more possible it is to tarnish.  

At Shipwreck, we often use 10K, which has more silver alloy in it, so sometimes we can get the gold to show more detail by using oxidation as a design tool. We generally never work with white gold unless requested. White gold tends to have a dull finish. In the jewelry industry, white gold is often plated with rhodium, which is in the platinum family. Because it’s not great for the environment and will not last, we try to avoid anything that requires plating.

Keeping it simple 

When it comes to cleaning your jewelry, we recommend keeping it simple. One of the best and affordable ways is to purchase a soft toothbrush. An old toothbrush might contain residual mild abrasives that can scratch your jewelry, so best to invest in a new one.

Then, using warm water and a gentle dish soap like Dawn, brush your jewelry like you would your teeth.  The toothbrush and Dawn combo work well for working around stone settings and details. For polishing the surface metal, we recommend Sunshine polishing cloths, which are infused with a solution for removing dirt, grime, and fingerprints from the jewelry’s surface. The cloths will turn black after use, but they can be reused, so hang on to them. Keep them in the container they came in or a Ziploc bag; you can use them many times before retiring them.

Beware of modern-day snake oils

The Internet offers many respectable seeming products that claim to clean jewelry. There are many unknown chemicals in these products, and we don’t recommend using your jewelry to see if they work or not. We’ve seen some strange things, like gold jewelry appearing silver because an unknown product “cleaned” the surface. 

There are many personal ultrasonic machines available as well. These machines can ruin beautiful stones like opals, pearls, moonstones, and cameos, which are among our favorite stones to work with.

Avoid ultrasonic machines for personal use if you can.

Safeguarding your stones

It's also advisable to remove jewelry before engaging in contact sports, bowling, or even gardening. One woman in Canada lost her wedding ring while gardening and found it thirteen years later on a carrot she pulled from the ground.

Resist the urge to key your ex’s car with your diamond too. Even diamonds and sapphires have the potential to chip or be knocked loose from their settings.

Here at Shipwreck Montauk, we often use coral and pearls in our designs, but neither rate very high on the Mohs scale of hardness. In fact, the cameo and Osmena rings literally feature shells, and their hardness is on par with your teeth, so if it’s an activity or use that would break your teeth, it’s likely to do the same to your jewelry. Avoid it at all costs.

Point Break for jewelry

Even jewelry has a breaking point. Big pieces like cuff bracelets seem tough but are often the most broken jewelry. Many people want them tighter on their wrists, so they bend them. That’s a no-no. Bending metal back and forth will cause it to weaken and break. Check out this great video that explains how to slide on a cuff bracelet.

If you’re interested in ordering a bracelet from Shipwreck Montauk but feel like you have a nonstandard wrist size, please get in touch. We ask for measurements of your wrist width and thickness to alter the form. Not every bracelet can accommodate larger and smaller wrists. We’re happy to customize when possible.

Clasps are another liability on jewelry, despite how well necklaces are made. Through the years, we’ve weeded out the majority of those that don’t hold up, but nothing is perfect. Should the clasp on jewelry you purchased from us break, email us at info@shipwreckmontauk.com, and we’ll do our best to repair or replace it for you.