The Complete Handbook of Jewelry Cleaning & Care

Chapter 1: Understanding Jewelry Cleaning & Care

Understanding Jewelry Cleaning & Care is not a subject you can master by reading product labels or listening to a sales rep. It is a practical discipline with real constraints: chemistry, material science, and mechanical engineering, applied to some of the least forgiving objects you will ever handle. A diamond may be indestructible, but an opal is not; a platinum setting may survive a high-powered cleaner, but a pearl will be ruined by it. The failures that occur in jewelry cleaning are rarely mysterious, but they are frequently misunderstood. Understanding the process from the ground up prevents those failures and gives you the confidence to handle anything that comes across your bench.

At its most basic level, jewelry cleaning is the removal of unwanted material from a jewelry item. That material is usually some form of soil: body oils, lotion, makeup residue, dead skin cells, dust, and environmental pollutants. Over time, these soils accumulate in the tiny recesses of settings, under stones, and in the links of chains. They also form a thin film on the surface of the metal, which dulls its luster and changes the way light reflects off it. On a gold ring, that film makes the metal look lifeless. On a diamond, it reduces the brilliance because the film interferes with both light entering the stone and light reflecting back out of it. So the first thing to understand is that cleaning jewelry is not simply a cosmetic exercise;