I'm sure many of you will have pieces in your jewelry collections that are too grubby to wear. There are plenty of products on the market to clean your jewelry with, but one of the easiest methods is using a soft toothbrush. Gemporia CEO, Steve Bennett, explains how to clean your gemstones properly.
Most gems with a crystal structure are best cleaned with lukewarm slightly soapy water. Often people just clean the table of their gemstones, but actually keeping your pavilions clean is just as important. Believe it or not, if you get grease or dirt on the pavilion it won’t display as much brilliance. Why? Because the layer of dirt or grease acts as the outer layer of the gem, altering the critical angle of the pavilion.
This is one of the main reasons we try and set most gemstones so that you can get to the pavilion. A really soft toothbrush is recommended for most cleaning or of course for many gems an ultrasonic cleaner does a great job too.
However, this does not apply to cabochon cut gems. Here it’s important that you don’t polish the underneath of the gem. Here we deliberately don’t polish these surfaces as if we did, light might travel through the gem, diminishing their optical phenomena.
