How To Care For Your Metal Jewellery

Hi, I'm Cherie Birks from Cool Diamonds in London, Hatton Garden. I'm a goldsmith here, I've been a goldsmith for nearly ten years and I trained for that in Australia. But ultimately, we sell diamonds mounted in platinum, 18kt white gold and 18kt yellow gold.

I'm here to demonstrate polishing and resizing of rings and diamond jewellery. Now, we're going to talk about how to polish sterling silver. Professionally, we'll do it.

I'll show you how I do it. And then I'll go through how you can do it at home. So we're going to start off on the polishing machine over here.

We use a series of cotton mops which are all different grades and we always work from coarse to fine. So, we start with a more coarse cotton and we use a coarse cutting compound to polish that. Just add some compound to the mop.

I'll just do one section so you can see. Then I'll move on to a slightly finer mop, which has a finer grain of cotton and we use a finer cutting compound. And again, we'll go on to the last mop which is the finest cotton and we use the finest cutting compound.

So that's polished but it's quite greasy. So, we'll go over to the sonic cleaner. In here is a bath of hot water, mild dish detergent, and some ammonia.

That just degreases your sterling silver jewellery. So we pull it out of there, just dry it off with a soft cotton cloth, and we also have a steam cleaner as well, so we'll come over here and steam this. So, you can see the difference there where I've polished it. .