Although it’s ideal to maintain regular cleanings at home, ensure you visit us for jewelry maintenance and care at least once every six months. Everyday products like hairspray, lotions, perfumes, and other cosmetics create a layer of film on your jewelry, causing the metals and stones to look dull and dirty. They can even cause corrosion.

Your jewelry’s age, fragility, metal, and stone type determine the cleaning method used. Our team knows the best ways to keep your jewelry shining. We believe each piece is unique and should be treated as such — let us show you what we can do! If your jewelry has lost its luster, visit Vinciguerra Jewelers for expert cleaning, polishing, and plating services.

Here are some essential facts about cleaning different metal and stone jewelry:

Metal Jewelry

Silver

Silver jewelry requires more cleaning than other precious metals because it tarnishes quickly when in contact with oxygen or sulfur. However, properly maintained silver jewelry improves with age and develops a lush patina.

Commercial silver cleaners can harm your jewelry by removing the anti-tarnish coating and patina. While at-home cleaners might give a temporary shine, the pieces will fade faster and require more frequent cleaning once you break down the surface.

Oxidized Silver

Some silver jewelry pieces contain oxidized or darkened features to create intricate detail. However, excessive cleaning and polishing can eliminate the detailing. Do not use silver cleaners on oxidized jewelry.

Gold

Although gold requires less frequent cleaning and buffing than silver, it can still accumulate dirt and grease. Gold jewelry can tarnish when exposed to chemicals like alcohol, acids, and sulfur compounds and break down in chlorine. Therefore, ensure your gold jewelry pieces receive regular cleaning.

White Gold

White gold combines metals (including yellow gold) with a rhodium coating. Bring your white gold pieces to Vinciguerra Jewelers for coating and polishing when they lose their luster. We’ll ensure they remain shiny and look more white than yellow.

Platinum

Platinum is resistant to tarnishing and blemishing due to chlorine and other chemicals, making it quite durable. As a dense metal, platinum is more challenging to polish than silver or gold. We recommend our expert jewelers polish your platinum pieces for you.

Gemstones

Dirt and your skin’s oils can collect on a stone’s surface and under its setting, causing it to lose brilliance. You should ensure your gemstone fashion jewelry receives regular cleanings from our Vinciguerra Jewelers. However, soft gemstones like opals, pearls, turquoise, and onyx require different treatments than hard gemstones, such as diamonds, rubies, and sapphires.

• Hard gemstones – Vinciguerra Jewelers use ultrasonic cleaners with high-frequency sound waves and chemicals that create bubbles. These bubbles attach to each dirt particle on the stone, and the sound waves bring the dirt to the surface. We do not recommend using at-home ultrasonic jewelry cleaners because they can cause stones to loosen, and you may not know what happened until you lose one!
• Soft gemstones – Ultrasonic or steam cleaners aren’t suitable for soft gemstone cleaning. Although you may desire to wipe dirt off your opal or pearl jewelry, we recommend leaving them alone. Most household dust is a 7 to 7.5 on the Mohs hardness scale, which is more than the soft gemstones’ range. Cleaning soft gemstones is a delicate process that our expert jewelers can carefully handle.

Jewelry Maintenance & Care

Numerous forces work against your jewelry daily, making regular checkups crucial to maintaining your piece. To ensure its longevity, we offer many jewelry repair services. Our St. Louis jewelry repair and maintenance services include the following:

• Correcting blemishes on precious metals
• Fixing loose prongs, worn mountings, and general wear and tear
• Correcting gemstones and pearls affected by light and heat
• Restringing pearls
• Correcting delicate gems harmed by chemicals