Jewellery Handling
We summarized a few practical basic rules from us under the keyword “jewellery handling”: Do not wear jewellery when doing housework or gardening, sports, in the shower or sunbathing or during a visit to the sauna. Damage surfaces, impacts and strong sunlight cause irreparable damage to sensitive materials. Do not wear your jewellery while swimming.
Chlorine and salt water can, for example, quickly lose the colour of gold and silver jewellery. More delicate gemstones can even be destroyed if not handled with care. The silk thread of the pearl necklace can get wet and no longer dries out properly. The result: the pearl rots from the inside out. Protect your jewellery from contact with cosmetics such as hairspray, powder, perfumes, deodorants, sunscreen, generally vapours, fats and oils.
Jewellery Handling
Put jewellery on until you have finished all other cosmetic work. Always protect your jewellery from light and airtight – preferably in a plastic bag with a strip of aluminium foil. So it stays bright and shiny much longer.
In rare cases, certain people may experience detachment or discolouration of the precious metal. Sometimes it affects gold-plated, silver-plated, and solid silver jewellery (blackening). The cause can be the use of certain medications, cosmetics, an immune reaction of the skin or simply the individual composition of the skin moisture. This effect also occurs with highly qualified gold and silver plating and therefore says nothing about the quality of the piece of jewellery.
People who experience this phenomenon should refrain from wearing gold-plated and silver-plated jewellery. This can be remedied by rhodium-plated silver jewellery or jewellery made of solid gold. For protection against tarnishing: precious metals also tend to tarnish. Precious metals do not oxidize, but tarnishing is a typical chemical property of metals in contact with sulphur. In doing so, they form a compound with sulphur and a black layer (e.g. silver sulphide).
Sulphur is often already present in the ambient air. In addition, there are other aggressive influences against which tarnish protection does not help. The fact is that some people react more to metals after skin contact than others. It is caused by sweat from the skin resulting from diet, certain medications, metabolism, or very salty sweat.
Please also refer to our article on how to take care of pearls.