How to keep your copper jewellery sparkling.

October 30, 2017

We live in geothermal metropolis of Rotovegas in New Zealand, so keeping copper clean can be a challenge with all those fragrant sulphur fumes wafting around the city.

Here is a fool proof way of getting your copper to gleam like new if you don't like burnished coppery tanished look.

Pick yourself a lemon from the neighbours tree.

Buddha minding the lemon tree.

Squeeze the juice into a bowl.

Squeeze the juice into your favourite bowl

Grind up some salt. (It just looked better for the photo, you can just shake in some table salt)

Grind up some sea salt

Plonk your copper jewellery into the mixture for a few seconds. This is where things went wrong. I wanted to show you the half/half result of the tarnished side versus the clean half side of the ring. However Tuco decided to come investigate and knocked it over.

Plonk your copper jewellery into the mixture.

I started again with another ring that was lightly tarnished.

Tarnished copper ring getting a soak.

This is before. Two copper rings slightly tarnished.

Two slightly tarnished copper rings.

This is about 10 seconds latter. One ring sparkling and the other not so much.

One tarnished and one clean copper ring.

The original heavily tarnished ring after a 5-10 second soak.

How to clean tarnished copper jewelry.

If your have a particularly heavily tarnished piece it might need soaking for a little longer and you can give it a gentle brush with a soft toothbrush. Don't put it back in the bathroom!!

Afterwards wash it off with some warm water and if you like you can buff it up with a little car wax. Waalaa. As easy as pie!!