How To Clean Silver Jewellery
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How To Clean Silver Jewellery
We all have jewellery that has been tarnished in one way or another. What do you do when that happens? This video will show you what you need to do to clean silver jewellery. Offering step-by-step instruction and also telling you how professionals do it, you will quickly learn how to clean your jewellery.
Hi, I'm Cherie Birks from Cool Diamonds in London, Hatton Garden. I'm a goldsmith here and 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. So, we're here to demonstrate on how to clean silver jewellery. This one's slightly tarnished.
We'll just use a bath of mild dish detergent, a small amount of ammonia, and warm water. You can rinse that in there for a little bit, just to degrease it. Bring it out, and if there's any gap or crevices, you can just brush around that with an old toothbrush.
Just rinse that off, then rinse it in water to get any detergent out. Just dry that with a soft cotton cloth. Then to use a polishing cloth on this, just to get rid of any tarnish, you just need to rub over the silver and it will get off any tarnish.
It can be a little bit tedious if there's lot of gaps. So, while I'm using a polishing cloth to polish this, professionally we would use a cotton mop which would be on a lathe and it's much less work. It's much quicker because the cotton mop does get in everywhere and a different array of sized brushes we would use to polish all this out as well.
There are products like silver dips and that sort of thing which you can get which you can dip the silver into which will take the tarnish off straight away but you really need to give them a really good rinse afterwards and then you still need to go over it with a polishing cloth to restore the shine of the metal as well. To professionally clean it, we would go over this with a really fine mop just to get off all the tarnish, get into all the little fiddly spots. It's much quicker than doing it by hand.
And a lot of jewellers will offer a clean and polishing service, anyway. And we'll take that over to the sonic bath. Take that out of the bath and give it a good rinse, and then I would steam that.
And that's how we clean silver jewellery. .