Over the years, people have said that they use toothpaste to polish their gold jewelry. I’ve always contended that it’s not a good thing because of the hardness of toothpaste and the hardness of gold are significantly different. You’ll scratch your gold ring. I’ve never tried it. Jewelry cleaning should proceed with caution especially if you have expensive fine jewelry pieces in a collection.
Today we’re going to give it a shot and see what actually happens, using toothpaste to clean a ring.
Bad Ideas to Clean Fine Jewelry with Toothpaste
Here’s what this ring looks like with a high polish. The toothpaste we are going to use is nationally advertised brand. The ring is a two-tone gold piece. The white side should be harder than the yellow side, so we’ll just see what effect this toothpaste has on cleaning this ring.
With this first scrubbing, you can definitely see all the scratches are there on the yellow gold. This is because the toothpaste with diatoms enough is the hardness of 5. The gold is three and a half in hardness. I’m not exactly sure but it looks more effective as expected on the yellow side than the white. However, both sides are scratched. We’re going to give this a second round of polishing to see how effectiveness gets changed.
The customer may do this five or six times before they bring it in to a professional jeweler for polishing. After our second polishing with a toothpaste, it’s starting to look like a satin finish. You can see all the minor scratches in the gold again. The white gold side of it has held up better but still scratched. Therefore, it is absolutely true that using toothpaste on a ring is a bad idea.
Now, we recommend using just a mild detergent you can use the toothbrush. We get into the back of the stone and brush the whole piece, but just use a mild detergent. You won’t get those scratch lines that you see from the toothpaste. So not only is it a bad idea to use toothpaste on gold and silver, it’s also a bad idea for many gems including turquoise malachite. Therefore, do not use toothpaste on your jewelry if you’ve been using it or if your rings just scratched up, you had better bring it to a professional jeweler. They can quickly and easily refinish your jewelry to a bright and shiny finish.
Toothpaste Cleaning for Cheap Costume Jewelry
You have already seen that toothpaste cleaning on gold jewelry can result in the scratch on the surface. You simply don’t want to mess with expensive jewelry in this manner. However, for your gold plated jewelry or silver plated jewelry, this is a great way to clean up that tarnish really fast. Especially in the case that you want to wear it out for the night and you don’t have that professional jewelry cleaner on you.
Just take a tarnished silver necklace and test the cleaning effectiveness with the toothpaste. I will do the half of cleaning, one part cleaned and the other half remains untouched. So, you can compare the effectiveness of toothpaste cleaning.
All you have to do is take the toothpaste and then finger rub it into the middle of the necklace like you would have soap. I get ready a bowl of water beside, so after you have it rubbed in, then dip it in the water and then rub it in the water as if you’re washing off the soap. Then, you take the necklace out the water and dry it with a cloth. You can spot that it’s working like magic by comparing the two parts, cleaned and tarnished one.
You can definitely see that the toothpaste method does work. I guess you don’t have to use the blue gel toothpaste all the time. However, I feel like when I do use the blue gel toothpaste, the results are a lot faster. I only have to do it like one time and then becomes really really nice and shiny. If you are hesitant about using the toothpaste method on your own jewelry, I would highly recommend doing a spot treatment in a very small area. Just to see how the metal reacts with the toothpaste that you are using. It’s very similar to what a hair dye company asks you to do in the directions. Just do a spot treatment before you dye your whole head.
