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Caring for Gold at Home: What Helps, What Ruins
Gold does not corrode, which leads people to assume it cannot be damaged. Most of the ruined pieces that arrive at a workshop were harmed at home, usually by something the owner thought was helping.
Gold does not rust and it does not tarnish. This is true, and it is the reason a great deal of gold jewellery gets treated carelessly. The metal is chemically stable; the ornament is not. Almost everything that goes wrong with a piece of jewellery happens to its structure, its stones or its surface, not to the gold itself.
The one chemical that genuinely attacks karat gold
Chlorine. Pure gold shrugs it off, but ornaments are alloys, and chlorine attacks the copper and silver in the alloy. The damage is not cosmetic. It works into the metal at the grain boundaries and makes it brittle, which is why a chain that has been worn in a swimming pool for a few years will one day break for no visible reason.
So: take gold off before swimming, and before using bleach or strong cleaning products. This is the single most useful rule in this article.
The other everyday hazards
- Cosmetics, perfume and hairspray build up a film in the details of a piece, dulling it. Apply them first, put jewellery on afterwards.
- Mercury, if you ever encounter it, will destroy gold on contact. It is rare, but broken thermometers exist.
- Other jewellery. Gold is soft. Pieces stored loose in a box scratch each other, and a diamond will scratch anything.
- Sleep and exercise. Most bent settings and pulled earlobes come from wearing pieces that were never designed to be worn while unconscious or while lifting something.
Cleaning, done simply
For plain gold, warm water and a drop of mild dish soap. Soak for fifteen minutes, brush gently with a soft toothbrush, rinse in clean water, dry with a soft cloth. That covers ninety per cent of cases.
Rinse away from an open drain, and if that sounds obvious, ask any jeweller how many customers have arrived to report the other outcome.
Where the simple method stops applying
Stones change the rules, and several common ones are much more delicate than the gold holding them.
- Emerald is usually oil-treated. Hot water and detergent strip the treatment and leave the stone looking worse than when you started.
- Pearl and coral are organic. Soap dulls them, and prolonged soaking damages the drill hole and the thread. Wipe with a barely damp cloth, nothing more.
- Turquoise is porous and absorbs whatever it is soaked in.
- Kundan and jadau work is set with lac behind the stones. Water gets in behind the setting and the lac softens. These pieces should never be soaked, and many should not be cleaned at home at all.
Ultrasonic cleaners deserve a specific warning. They are excellent on plain gold and on hard, untreated stones, and they will comfortably shake a loose stone out of its setting, crack an included emerald, and destroy anything set with lac.
Storage
Separate compartments or individual soft pouches. Chains fastened before storing, which prevents most tangles. Somewhere dry.
The annual check that saves pieces
Once a year, take anything you wear regularly to a jeweller and ask them to check the settings and the clasps. It takes a few minutes and usually costs little or nothing.
A worn clasp or a thinning prong is trivially repaired while it is still attached to your jewellery. The same problem discovered afterwards is not a repair, it is a loss. Nearly every stone that falls out was loose for weeks first, and it is nearly always noticeable to someone who knows what to look for.