How Not to Clean your Jewelry
I can still remember sitting in a chemistry class, so bored that I was supporting my increasingly heavy head on the heel of my left hand, when I got a whiff of the most disgusting odour. I looked at the classmate to my left, from where the smell seemed to be emanating.
He was an immaculately turned out pupil who smelled more of soap than, well, soap did. The culprit lay closer to home. I gazed down at my wrist. A quick sniff of my watch strap, and I nearly gagged. A few weeks of washing-up at home without bothering to take my watch off had taken its toll. My watch-strap, and particularly the thin rungs that connected the strap to the watch, reeked of rotting detergent and semi-dissolved food particles.
It was as though the dog had thown up on my wrist. I was in need of a strong chemical to neutralize the smell. I was in need of a jewelry cleaner.
Professionals can clean any item of jewelry. It can be a tricky task to find the right cleaning tool/chemical combo to get the job done, but an indepth knowledge of gems, metals and stones enables the professional to come up with the right solution every time. However, for a gangly, acne-ridden 15-year-old school boy, taking a minging watch to the jewelers would have been a devastating experience. I might as well have donned a sack-cloth and walked around ringing a bell and intoning ‘Unclean!’ to warn my classmates away. I had no choice. I had to do it at home.
You might well come across articles that warn of the ‘risks’ associated with certain types of jewelry cleaner. By ‘risks,’ such articles probably mean the risk to the Continue Reading…
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