Over time, any piece of jewelry becomes covered with a thin layer of dirt and oxide, from which it loses its luster and darkens. Let's figure out how to deal with it.
How to clean silver earrings at home?
There are several ways to clean dirt from silver earrings. The easiest way to do this is by hand. For this you will need:
- tube of toothpaste or tooth powder
- an old toothbrush or other small brush
- distilled or filtered water,
- a piece of soft cloth.
The brush must first be treated with boiling water to remove dirt, grains of sand, etc. Then moisten the earrings with prepared water and apply toothpaste on the surface of the jewelry. Tap water is best avoided due to the presence of salts and other minerals in it that can oxidize silver.
After this, the earrings should be set aside for five minutes so that the paste acts on the dirt. Then rinse in water and gently wipe with a soft cloth. If the earrings are clean, then there will be no dark spots on it. Remaining - it is necessary to repeat the procedure.
For another, slightly more complicated method, you will need:
- soda,
- distilled or filtered water,
- food foil about 10 by 10 cm.
It is necessary to dissolve two tablespoons of soda in a container with half a liter of water. Bring this solution to a boil and lower the foil into it first, and then the earrings for 10 minutes.
How and with what can you clean gold earrings?
Pure gold is chemically passive and does not oxidize. But due to the presence of copper in jewelry gold, jewelry from it is covered with oxide, so they have to be cleaned. There are two ways: chemical and mechanical. The first one seems to be very simple - with soapy water. But there are too many subtleties of the process of both cleaning and drying. Without knowing them, you can either not achieve a result, or completely spoil the product.
Therefore, to clean gold earrings at home, it is better to use the second one - wipe the jewelry thoroughly with a soft cloth. Synthetics are also suitable, for example - fleece. After removing the dirt, you can polish the gold with a clean side of the cloth to make it shine longer.
How to clean the stone in the earrings?
Precious minerals also tarnish over time, regardless of color, be it diamonds or topaz. If the former lose their luster, then the colored stones darken.
First of all, you should try a simple and not risky mechanical method of cleaning with toothpaste, which is described at the beginning of the article.
It didn’t help - you don’t need to use, to put it mildly, the strange ways that people exchange on the Internet. Often they can damage jewelry. If a gentle mechanical cleaning method does not help, it is better to buy one of the cleaning products sold in jewelry stores. Before that, you need to find out from the salon specialists whether it is suitable for a particular product.
If the result was not achieved, you need to go to the jewelry workshop. Its employees are responsible for their work, unlike Internet advisers offering home experiments in chemistry.
