How To Care For Your Sterling Silver Jewelry

How To Care For Your Sterling Silver Jewelry

Cleaning Your Jewelry

As a long-time jewelry blogger, you learn a thing or two about keeping your jewelry clean and pristine. No one wants to see pictures of tarnished or dirty silver, it’s just not done.

Many people ask me how I get my jewelry looking great. Do I use Photoshop? No, nothing like that, I just clean them before I take pictures and use a DLSR camera. There’s nothing more to it.

Of course, you might be wondering what my cleaning process looks like. In your head, I’m probably sitting at home rubbing some magic goop on a piece for hours on end, that’s just not the case.

Your Options

There are three different ways to approach the issue of dirty jewelry.

You can buy the goop, which is typically a gel or a liquid that you dip your jewelry into and clean off with a rag. One of the most popular brands is “Connoisseurs Quick Jewelry Cleansing Gel” from Target but it also get’s poor reviews from Amazon. Check out this unhappy customer;

“Worthless, tried it on my wedding band set, couldn’t tell I’d done anything.”

In my opinion, the gel works well but I don’t use it is because of the mess. It feels sticky and gross after I use it. This could also be just me but I feel like it never gets the entire thing clean either.

The second option is a jewelry cleaning machines. Megasonic is the top brand in this field but my issue is the price. There are some that use a gel and some that just use steam. Both are expensive in my opinion. The steam cleaners are around $60-$100 and the ones that use gel are only $40, however, you have to keep buying the gel for them. Another review for the Megasonic went like this:

“Didn’t seem to do anything. Even ordered the cleansing fluid. Tried spoons, a watch and rings. Didn’t seem to have any effect.”

Well, that’s not too great either.

The third and last option is the one that I use. A simple piece of jewelry cleaning cloth. This is a specially treated dry polishing cloth that makes your jewelry shine and won’t tarnish your pieces.

You literally just rub the cloth on your jewelry and it shines like new. To prove it, after you clean your jewelry, look at the cloth and watch it turn black from dirt. it’s really amazing how effective this cheap little option can be.

Like the other options, there are a ton of brands out there. I typically buy mine here but you can find them almost anywhere (Amazon, Target, Walmart, Etc.)

What I like to do is place the cloth over my hand like a glove and rub the jewelry pretty rough with my pointer-finger and thumb.

You’d be surprised at the number of uses you’ll get from one cloth. It’s less than ten bucks and after many, many uses, you just toss it and buy a new one. I go with this option because there’s no mess involved.

You can read more about jewelry on my blog.