How To Clean Tarnished Silver

Hi, I am Cherie Birks from Cool Diamonds in London, Hatton Garden. And I am a goldsmith here, and I have been a goldsmith here for ten years and I trained for that in Australia, and we deal with the diamonds mounted in platinum and 18-karat yellow gold. And I am here to demonstrate polishing and resizing the rings and diamond jewelry.

Okay, and now we are going to talk about tarnish, tarnish defines to oxidation on jewelry because tarnish is usually found from sulphur in the air and tarnish is generally more yellow, and lot of jewelry nowadays is oxidized for decorative effect. So we have to be careful when you are removing the tarnish that you don't remove the oxidization. Usually like mechanical cleaning, like polishing, that sort of thing will remove both.

So set the tarnish, it's fine to get rid of that going heavily on it and removing the decorative oxidization. Things will make tarnishing worse; it will be lot of chemicals, say hair sprays, perfumes, chlorines and bleaches, and creams. You need to be very careful that you don't wear jewelry while you are doing that sort of things because it will alter the tarnish.

Wearing your jewelry frequently will also inhibit tarnish build up. Because it's sort of being worn and the metal is sort of being rubbed all the time, and if it's just sitting there and that will accumulate tarnish quickly. For silver, store it in a big bag then the tarnish won't accumulate because it's not new air circulating around the silver.

Tarnish is caused by a chemical reaction between the air and the metal. Generally, silver will tarnish more, also the gold. Pure gold never tarnish because that's not its nature.

But silver will tarnish because of sulphides in air attacking the metal, and will just form the tarnish around it. Let's see the different ways how we can remove the tarnish. First way is obviously mechanical.

So it will require polishing which needs polishing cloth. There are chemicals which you can use for removing tarnish, there are rubs which you can use and there are also dips which you can use to remove tarnish. The chemical that we use for removing tarnish are not always the best because of course, they can damage the environment.

They can be poisonous, corrosive for skin and they often smell bad as well and quite often if you don't rinse off your jewelry properly, the tarnish that will reoccur will be worse than what it started with. So always go for environmental friendly products if you can. The mechanical way for removing tarnish by rubbing or using polishing cloth is much safer, cleaner and it does take more time but it's much more environmentally friendly and safer for your life than using chemicals.

And that's how you each know about cleaning tarnish. .