Vintage Jewelry Showcase: Don't Wear Your Fine Jewelry in the Hot Tub!

As my daughters and I languished in the hot tub this past Victoria Day holiday weekend (Canada), the last thing on my mind was jewelry. The night air was crisp, the hot tub was a hot 105 degrees, and the Panama Jack over ice tasted very nice indeed.Resins are usually produced by means of carbon fabric of bisphenol-A, epichlorohydrin and a few other chemical reactants.It wasn't until the next morning while I was reading the paper that I noticed the 14k gold bracelet on my wrist looked rather dingy and dark. I initially thought it might be the newsprint ink but on closer inspection, I knew it couldn't be. It looked so awful and I'd only cleaned it the week before.Vintage style remodeling Clawfoot tubs items are widely available in market these days which makes it possible for us to design interior of bathroom with same style. Suddenly, I had the horrors: what about the two gold necklaces I always wear? I took them off. They looked dreadful: blackened almost. The diamonds look grey too. Were my eyes deceiving me? I asked my husband to look at all 3 pieces. He confirmed my fears: something had tarnished or,Selection of tub is one of the factors that can make-or-break overall look of your Antique faucets, if you have decided for vintage style bathroom. possibly worse yet, damaged the gold in all three pieces of jewelry.A light bulb went on in my head: something I'd read a little while back came to me. The article had been about caring for gold jewelry and one thing it said was take it off if you're swimming in a chlorinated pool. Now I swim 2-3 times a week but hadn't really noticed any discoloration on the necklaces. Yet this was really bad, and it had to have something to do with that 90 minutes or so that I enjoyed in the hot tub without removing my jewelry.My daughter confirmed the hot tub chemicals were a mix of chlorine and bromine, with some eucalyptus essence tossed in to lessen the chemical smell. So I hit the net to see if I could find out more and boy, did I ever!

One helpful website on the care of jewelry stated:"Keep jewelry away from scratching,We owe a lot of our beneficial infrastructure to the efforts of the competent workmen behind Used construction machinery products. banging, chemicals of all kinds, swimming pools, hot tubs,Having such properties has paved its way to be utilized in floor carbon prepreg and paints in industrial and automobile industry. extreme temps, strenuous activity, and intense sunlight. The chlorine and bromine in pools and hot tubs is particularly damaging to stones and metal, and will even damage solid gold."Yikes! I dug further and on THIS WEBSITE, found even more disturbing information. Hoover and Strong, a highly regarded supplier of jewelry items in gold, silver and platinum, had conducted tests to discover the greatest causes of prong breakage. Their tests determined that "the greatest factors are exposure to chlorine and bromine-chemicals commonly used in hot tubs, swimming pools, laundry products, and even municipal water supplies."The site went on to state these results from the tests:- 5 percent chlorine bleach heated to 110 degrees Fahrenheit: prong failure would occur after 21 hours of exposure. (Only the platinum and palladium white gold settings held their stones in this, the "worst" test solution.)- 5 percent chlorine bleach at room temperature: prong failure would occur after 120 hours of exposure.- 5 ppm (parts per million) chlorine using hot tub chemicals: prong failure would occur after 312 hours or 156 days (based on two hours a day, seven days a week).- 5 ppm bromine using hot tub chemicals: prong failure would occur after 384 hours or 192 days.Reading that apart from the chlorine and bromine, heat was a factor, I now understood why I hadn't really seen much damage from all my pool swimming: the pools are not a smoking 105 degrees like that hot tub we'd enjoyed so much. But obviously it's probably only a matter of time before even the pool swimming would have seriously damaged my fine jewelry.Since it happened, I've soaked the necklaces and bracelet in soapy water and given them a gentle brush before rinsing thoroughly. They look much better but there's a dullness that wasn't there before. Next step will be our polishing cloths that we use to buff up our fine jewelry items and I hope that will restore the original luster. But will it last? Just how much damage did that 90 minutes of hot tubbing do? I don't want to think about it but I hope you will remember this article the next time you're about to do some laps or relax in the spa.