My silver jewellery turned black in the Blue Lagoon! What do I do?

This is something that came up last week when Brogan Tate didn’t think to take off her silver bracelets before getting in a sulphur bath in Tbilisi (one I haven’t been to and is on my list for my return trip, so I’m kind of jealous!). The minerals in the water blackened them, as they blackened my rune pendant when I also didn’t think to take it off when I was there two years ago but Tbilisi sulphur baths are a bit more niche than lagoons in Iceland. But the question is the same: what do you do when your jewellery tarnishes in mineral water?

A selfie in Mtskheta in Georgia a couple of days after my sulphur bath. I'm wearing a silver bindrune pendant representing energy which is noticeably blacker and more tarnished than it should be. — It isn’t just the shadows; that thing should be sparkly silver and instead it’s, at best, gunmetal grey.

In an ideal world, you should take off your jewellery before you get in any water, whether that’s the Blue Lagoon, Gulos’s Thermal Spa, your own shower or sticking your hands in the washing-up bowl. In practice, many of us don’t. I’m not a particularly “put together” sort of person but I like to be wearing a bit of jewellery in a hot pool. Pools of spring water warmed by proximity of natural hot spring water might be ok. Your shower might be ok. But if the water comes hot out of the ground, it’s probably going to tarnish your jewellery and I have four ways of fixing that.

A selfie at the Sky Lagoon. I'm sitting against the cliff wall, facing the sunset, rune pendant and tiny huggie hoop earrings visible.

Old-fashioned cleaning

I have a polishing cloth impregnated with silver polish and that’s my go-to nine times out ten. I would generally put the cloth down on my desk and rub the jewellery over it because that feels like an easier way than holding both up. My rune pendant has arms sticking out and I can more or less fold the cloth and “floss” between the arms to get the black off. If your jewellery is too detailed, a better way might be to immerse it in a tub of silver polishing liquid. You can get both from Argos, or indeed from most local jewellers. My pot of liquid has a sort of strainer in it so you drop the jewellery in and then lift out the strainer to retrieve it two or three minutes later. Put it through a second time if needed. Because it’s liquid, it can get into absolutely every crevice.

The same bindrune lying on a very blackened, once pink, cloth. The black is polish, so it's meant to look like this but it is getting past its best by now.

Now, a word of warning: I do not like the liquid. I don’t know if it’s actively toxic but I rinse my jewellery thoroughly in clean water after it’s been in the solution and I scrub my hands. The website for my particular brand is very vague – you should dispose of it by taking it to your local recycling centre rather than just binning it, which sounds like it’s something to be careful with.

A blue pot of silver polishing solution with my rune hanging over it (but not actually dropped in because I can't be bothered to get up and rinse and dry it right now).

DIY

A DIY electrolysis bath is what the internet generally recommends – get a tray or bowl (a bowl is better because it’s deeper and allows your jewellery to be fully immersed), line it with tin foil, sprinkle some bicarbonate of soda over it and then pour in boiling water. Someone else recommends the same ingredients but combined differently – mixing warm water with the bicarb until you form a paste and using that, with a brush if necessary, to clean.

I’ve not tried this method myself – the cloth is easier to pack if I want to fix my mistakes while I’m in Iceland and it’s still less messy if you decide to wait until you get home, but it does seem to work and people do seem to swear by it. I gather you need to be careful with non-silver things, like gemstones or enamel – anything that might be damaged by hot water or chemical fizzing so if I did decide to go with this method, I wouldn’t do it for anything except something simple like my rune. Any stones, anything complicated – stick to the cloth.

The spendy solution

Now I realise as I check on prices, that this isn’t quite as expensive as I’ve always assumed. If you don’t want to mess around with kitchen ingredients or elbow grease, you can buy an ultrasonic cleaner and just drop your tarnished jewellery in it! You can get an industrial-looking ultrasonic cleaner for around £95 from the Range or for as low as £21.24 from Amazon.

Not only will one of these clean your tarnished silver jewellery, it’ll clean anything else that can be safely dropped in water, like your glasses, car parts, tools, dentures or apparently razors. If you’re cleaning jewellery, you do have to be careful with gemstones, anything especially delicate or porous and jewellery with glue or epoxy but you’re probably ok with your everyday jewellery. If it can survive the Blue Lagoon, albeit blackened, it’s probably ok with the ultrasonic cleaner but don’t take my word for it, I’ve never used one.

Take it to a jeweller to have it cleaned professionally

If you’re at all nervous about any of these methods or if you’ve tried them and they don’t work, many jewellers do professional cleaning. I suspect they probably use some variation of those three methods above but they’re professionals and will know what might get damaged and what will be fine. It’s not the most convenient option, because it requires you to find a jeweller and probably to leave your stuff there and return for it later but it’s probably the safest option.

Or you could avoid getting your jewellery tarnished in the first place

Prevention is better than cure. Other than my silver rune pendant, nothing I wear in the water is tarnishable these days. My personal preference is for stainless steel jewellery, which is non-reactive. I bought a Viking ring in Norway many years ago and that thing has no idea it’s ever been in water that might damage it, so I invested in a pair of earrings, a chain bracelet and a bangle, most of which I think are from Etsy. The bracelets are both shiny silver finishes and the earrings are gunmetal and they’ve been in dozens of pools across Iceland, Germany, Budapest, Bucharest and Tbilisi without a mark on them. The bonus with the earrings is that they’re small enough but solid enough that I can barely feel them, so I can quite happily sleep in them or wash my hair with them in, so they’ve become my default day-to-day earrings these days.

A pair of gunmetal stainless steel hoop earrings, a bangle and my El Camino bracelet, a cord bracelet threaded with stainless steel "steps" as well as an assortment of coloured glass ones representing various experiences and places.

There are also various brands advertising “waterproof jewellery”. That’s basically jewellery that could tarnish but with something called a PVD – physical vapour deposition – coating, which is a thin layer of non-reactive metal applied over the actual jewellery. It’s fine as long as the coating doesn’t start to wear away, which it does eventually. I’ve got a couple of pairs of earrings and a couple of necklaces in shiny gold from Lovisa and they’ve held up ok so far, which is a little over a year. They probably haven’t been in all that many geothermal pools but I took them for a dip in Myvatn Nature Baths (now the Earth Lagoon) and the swimming pool at Hofn last summer, Hvammsvik last December and possibly one of the thermes in Germany about this time last year and they’re looking just fine.