HOW TO PROPERLY CLEAN SILVER JEWELLERY

Imagine: you're going out for a special meal. You've picked the perfect outfit, shoes and makeup. You go to add your favourite piece of silver jewellery as a finishing touch, but you open your jewellery box to discover it's covered in awful brown and black tarnish, rendering it unwearable. What now? While you can remove silver tarnish easily enough, doing so the wrong way or with the wrong products can cause more tarnish or - even worse - cause damage to your jewellery. Thankfully learning how to clean silver jewellery is simpler than you think and it only requires a few tools and techniques. Once you've learned the process, cleaning your favourite silver pieces will become routine, and you won't be shocked at opening your jewellery box to a tarnished necklace again. Keep reading to learn all about how to clean your silver jewellery properly to extend the life of your favourite pieces and be able to enjoy wearing them whenever you like. This guide is specifically about cleaning silver jewellery. You might like to also check out our 10 tips to quickly clean jewellery which also covers other metals and gemstones.

WHAT IS SILVER TARNISH? According to Wikipedia, tarnish is a product of a chemical reaction between a metal and a non-metal compound, most commonly oxygen and sulphur dioxide, which forms a metal oxide (and sometimes metal sulphide or chloride) on the metal. The good news is that normal tarnish on silver is not corrosive and the metal underneath the oxide layer should be just fine. However, silver can also tarnish from exposure to chlorine and acids which may potentially be more damaging to the metal, including causing pits to appear.