How to clean jewellery at home without ruining it

Almost every trick doing the rounds works on one material and ruins another. The difference is not in the cleaning method, which is nearly always the same: it is in which product is allowed to touch each piece.

The method that works for everything

1. A bowl of warm water, not hot.
2. A drop of mild soap (unscented hand soap, or a gentle washing-up liquid).
3. The piece in there for two or three minutes, no longer.
4. Rub with your fingers, or with a very soft make-up brush in the crevices. Never a toothbrush.
5. Rinse with clean water.
6. Dry it completely with a microfibre cloth, crevices included. This is the step almost everyone skips, and it is the one that matters most.

This is safe on silver, gold, steel, plated pieces and cubic zirconia. If your piece is simply dull with grease and hand cream — which is the case 90% of the time — this brings it back.

What changes with the material

Why bicarbonate of soda is no good on a plated piece

Because it works by scraping. Bicarbonate of soda is a mild abrasive: on solid silver it takes off the black layer of sulphide and underneath there is still silver, millimetres of silver. On a plated piece, underneath the gold there is no more gold: there is a thin layer of coating and then the base metal. Every pass with bicarbonate takes away part of that layer, and the result is a piece that shines for two days and is bare in the rubbed areas within a month.

The same goes, for different reasons, for toothpaste (abrasive), vinegar and lemon (acids that attack the base metal through the pores in the plating) and alcohol or acetone (they dissolve enamels and the adhesives holding glued stones).

And ultrasonic cleaners

An ultrasonic cleaner is excellent for solid gold with claw-set stones, and a bad idea for everything else. On a plated piece the vibration lifts the coating at the edges; on any piece with glued stones — most costume jewellery with cubic zirconia — it knocks them off. If you do not know how your stone is set, do not use one.

If it is still dull after cleaning

Then it was not dirty. On a plated piece, shine that does not come back means the coating has been used up in that spot: it shows as a pinker or greyer tone at the rubbing points, the inside of a ring, the clasp of a chain. Pushing on with products only speeds up the rest.

It is not a manufacturing fault, it is the normal end of the life of plating, and why it arrives sooner or later is explained in gold plating explained.

Storing them well cleans more than cleaning them

• Dry and separate. Each piece in its own pouch or its own slot: two chains together scratch each other.
• Out of the bathroom. It is the dampest room in the house and where almost everyone leaves them.
• Out of direct sunlight if they have enamel: the sun dulls it over the years.

The day to day of our pieces, with what to do and what not to, is in caring for your jewellery, and the water side of it in can gold-plated jewellery get wet?