If you've purchased one of my designs then you'll be familiar with the little card I send out with orders that has details of how to care for and clean your jewellery.
And I mention that you shouldn't wear your jewellery when you go swimming or if you're using cleaning products. Common sense advice that I hope you've taken on board! So I thought I'd share with you why you should be careful of cleaning products - specifically bleach.
I'm an experimenter, and one of the ways I like to add interest to my handmade jewellery is to add a deliberate patina, and some of my items have a dark finish that I add with special magical chemicals that jewellers can purchase. When the topic of patina chemicals comes up in jewellery forums, bleach is always mentioned as something that can be deliberately used to blacken silver so I figured it would be useful to try it out for myself.
I started with a bottle of inexpensive bleach, a small dish, a pair of tweezers and a large sterling silver jump ring.
I didn't do anything to the jump ring - when you're deliberately adding patina you should always ensure that the item is scrupulously clean because even a small patch of natural oils from your fingers can affect how the patina adheres to the metal. As this was an experiment for the sake of experimenting I figured I'd pick up the jump ring and not clean it up first.
After pouring a small amount of bleach into the dish I used the tweezers and popped the jump ring into the bleach.
Initially nothing happened, but then I'm used to patina chemicals that work immediately. But it didn't take long for the bleach to turn the silver very dark indeed.
I was so astonished by what I saw that I decided to drop another ring in and film it - this clip is only a minute long - and you'll see the first ring in the dish and a second one that I drop in so that you can see the way the bleach reacts with the silver. You mght want to turn the sound down because the noise of my tweezers in the bottom of the dish is a bit....grating.
Black! In fact it's a really nice dark shade of black! The next thing I did was to pop one of the rings into my tumble polisher - after an hour of tumbling some of the dark patina had been removed, but the silver was still very dark. I then used one of the polishing cloths I have and the silver stayed dark, just got even shinier.
In the photo, at the top is an unbleached ring, in the middle the bleach blackened ring that has been tumbled polished and at the bottom is the second bleached silver ring - any jewellers reading this post might want to note that there's a shiny patch at the top right of the lower ring, that's solder that I hadn't cleaned up, so bleach doesn't change the colour of solder.
So there you have it. If you get bleach on your artisan handmade silver jewellery (it's important to keep saying that, because commercial silver jewellery that you can buy from high street sellers is often plated with rhodium to keep it tarnish free) there's every chance that it's going to go black. A similar reaction can happen if you wear items in swimming pools so be mindful of that too. This colour CAN be removed, but it takes a bit more elbow grease and a proper polish using products that us jewellers have to hand.
And a last photo for the jewellers - if you want to add a dark patina to your hand crafted silver items, you can use bleach. Just like some of the other chemicals we use the patina will wear off of high spots and change over time, but that for me is one of the joys of it. It ages and changes just like we do. Above you can see four rings that have been darkened with Platinol, and at the top of my finger is one of the bleach blackened jump rings, given a 20 minute run in my tumble polisher. Not a bad result if that's the effect you're after.