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What Causes Silver to Tarnish?

What silver tarnish is and how to avoid it

It's a question I get a lot of. "Is this silver and will it tarnish?" Tarnish is the bane of both jewelry makers and jewelry lovers alike. It's disappointing and infuriating to buy a nice piece of silver jewelry with a brilliant shiny finish only to see that finish slowly darkened and dulled by that ugly grey coating within months. In this month's newsletter I'll explain what tarnish is and why it effects silver the way it does.

When silver is new or freshly polished, it looks bright and shiny. Over a period of months, that finish begins to slowly change from bright and shiny to first a light yellowing, then progressively to a deeper yellow to gray and eventually to a dark black color. That coating that goes from light yellow to black is called tarnish. And it occurs when silver comes in contain with items that contain hydrogen sulfide.

Hydrogen sulfide can be found in items such as wool, fossil fuels, foods such as onions and eggs, and materials such as rubber, paint and latex. If you store your jewelry in environments that contain a high concentration of these materials, or if you even handle your jewelry after eating a meal that contains hydrogen sulfide, it's likely that your jewelry will begin to tarnish. Your climate also effects how fast and how badly your silver will tarnish, so if you live in a climate that has high humidity, your jewelry will tarnish much faster and more severely.

The sad truth is, is that it's the nature of silver to tarnish. But there are ways to either slow down the tarnishing process and ways to remove tarnish from your silver jewelry safely. In next month's newsletter, I'll tell you about the different ways you can prevent tarnish from attacking your silver and how to safely clean your tarnish from your favorite jewelry.

Photo by jennconspiracy

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