Jewelry Care Guide
If you have just purchased one of my new, unique, artisan jewelry pieces, congratulations! Follow my Jewelry Care Guide to ensure your wearable art will last for years and years.
All jewelry requires proper care to keep it looking beautiful. The technique I use in crafting my jewelry results in a more delicate piece than a manufactured, industrial piece. This means that tossing it onto your bureau dresser is not recommended! Caring for your hand crafted jewelry needs a gentle touch and takes only seconds to perform preventive maintenance. In fact, most all of your jewelry would benefit from following this guide.
General Care for All Types of Jewelry
- Apply all your cosmetics, perfumes, lotions and hair sprays first, allowing the chemicals to completely dry before putting on your jewelry. Remove your jewelry if you must reapply.
- Wash your hands before picking up your jewelry. Oils and other contaminents from your skin will transfer to the jewelry and hasten degradation of the finish or mar a beautiful polish. In fact, professional jewelers wear gloves to prevent contamination when showing or displaying their pieces. That’s a good indication of great care!
- Keep a special jewelry cloth handy to wipe your items as you are removing them to get ready for storage. This is very important because you don’t want to store your jewelry if there are contaminents on the surface.
Professional jewelry cloths are available from most jewelry or department stores, craft or bead shops, and online. The cloths are embedded with special compounds to remove tarnish and other containment and leave a beautiful polish.
Jewelry Storage
- There are several ways of storing your jewelry, but all of them will require that they be stored in a protective environment. This is especially true for hand crafted jewelry that would mangle when tossed into a box with other jewelry. Choose the storage method that works for you or come up with your own storage following the methods below.
- Keep your jewelry in the box it comes in and put the entire box into a sealed plastic bag.
- Put each jewelry piece inside a sealed plastic bag, and then inside its presentation box or jewelry box. Don’t let pieces touch each other. For example: Each earring needs to be stored in its own little plastic sealed container, then both earrings can be placed inside the presentation box.
- Do NOT put jewelry that contains pearls inside sealed plastic bags. Pearls require moisture and need to ‘breathe’. Do not immerse strung pearls in water however, as you may break or weaken the stringing material. Pearls should be hung inside its own compartment in a jewelry box, or keep the pearls inside its presentation box.
Cleaning Jewelry
- Never immerse your jewelry in any kind of ‘dip it’ cleaners or any cleaner that contains harsh chemicals.
- If you follow preventive maintenance and storage as outlined above, your jewelry will rarely need ‘industrial’ cleaning.
Sterling or Fine Silver
- All my sterling silver jewelry has a polish on the surface to help prevent tarnish. To keep it tarnish free, always wipe gently with a jeweler’s polishing cloth before returning it to storage.
- Sterling silver that has a patina or antique finish should also be wiped, but take care to only wipe the ‘high’ spots or surfaces. Vigourous polishing with a cloth may removed the antique finish.
Copper Jewelry
- All my copper jewelry has a special finish that prevents or halts tarnishing. This application is applied to both the high shine copper pieces and those pieces that have an antique or patina finish. Wiping with a soft cloth is all that is needed to care for the copper pieces.
Professional Cleaning
- If you are not comfortable cleaning any of my jewelry art pieces, you can return them to me and I will professionally clean them for you. Please email me first, so I can give you an estimate of the cleaning costs.
Jewelry Repair
- I will repair my own jewelry designs. Please refer to my Repair Policy.