Cleaning And Caring For Your Charms: What You Need To Know

As a proud Pandora charm bracelet owner I take great care in choosing the charms that go on my bracelet every day and get to show them to quite a few people whose eye it catches. How embarrassing it would be to have bits of dirt, skin cream and makeup on my charm! Having owned Pandora bracelets for quite a while I’ve devised a fairly good casual maintenance plan to go along with the twice-yearly cleaning as recommended by Pandora themselves here. There are some serious do’s and don’ts that I’ve come to learn over the years, and sometimes the hard way, so even though I might not be the foremost authority on precious metal cleansing I’ve got a few tips that might make your life easier and even save the lives of your precious charms.

Prevention Over Cure

Well the best way to have a clean bracelet is quite obvious: don’t get it dirty! If you’re going to encounter some mud, dirt or grime that put that bracelet away somewhere safe. It might seem totally obvious, but the odd scrape against our charms can cause damage that’s totally irreparable.

The over thing is to store you bracelet in an appropriate the place. Gold generally keeps much better than silver as it’s not as reactive a metal, so most people are concerned with silver tarnishing. Tarnishing happens when silver reacts with various chemicals and oxygen in the air. The metal will look different from its colour as the outmost layer of jewellery undergoes a chemical reaction. While this process might help to protect the metal below the outer layer you want to let the silvers shine so it’s best to watch out and clean away any tarnish that appears.

Cleaning Silver Tarnish

First of all check that the tarnish on your silver isn’t there on purpose! Pandora has many silver charms where the silver is oxidised to create a contrast between the light and dark tones. Pandora uses processes to oxidise their silver charms very precisely, but even your cloths can ruin the desired effect of the darker layer. To clean you can shop around for any kind of paste or solution that you can rub into the tarnish to take it off or a special silver polishing cloth which will have some solution inside to help take off the darkness. Follow the instructions of the cleaner, but generally when cleaning charms and bracelets you’ll want to give a simple rub down in hot water and a soft cloth to remove dirt and oils.

Storing Your Bracelet

As part of care, storing your bracelet is very important. Basically, to avoid tarnishing your bracelet and charm you’ll want a space that it free of air flow. Pandora does have special soft cloth bags to store your charms in (the box you get with the bracelet isn’t actually the best for charm and bracelet storage). Even something as simple as a zip lock plastic baggy can keep out air is better for your charms than a padded and fancy box, but of course you can keep your plastic bag of charms in there if you want to look a little stylish!

Charm Of The Month: Duotones

Happy new year to all of you and hope you had amazing time around the countdown. We all have resolutions of course, and mine was to do monthly reviews of charms, and just my favourites! This month I’m going to look at duotone charms that make up a big part of Pandora’s charm collection. The word duotone is usually used in the context of photography, a technique where the photo’s colours are split between differing shades of only two colours. The result is a picture with high contrasts and can be used to highlight a certain colour in a shot. Duotone jewellery and charms are no different in what they use the duotone effect is used for. The two tones in question here are silver and gold and the aim is usually to add a bit of gold to a silver piece to highlight certain parts of the charm. There are some really fantastic charms out there that use gold to add a special touch to a classic design. It seems one of the favourite things to highlight is a heart as seen below! You can’t blame the designers though, the effect really makes the heart stand out and glow in a cute way.

And if hearts aren’t your style then there are some really intricate charms that use the duotone effect to great effect in some really intricate styles. A lot of the flower and rose duotones are make a great mix of gold and silver with the rose petals in the shining gold to really make it pop against the silvery background. Or the dove charm with gold doves flying off, leaving their imprints in the silver metal.

Styling Tips For Duotone Charms

Looking at the wide range of duotone charms I think that a whole bracelet theme can be made out of these charms. A silver bracelet with lots of duotone charms using pure silver spacers will provide a great canvas for the intricate bits of gold to shine through the bracelet. Maybe throwing in a few gold charms will create a nice alternating effect between silver and gold. Whatever you do, I think it’s best to keep the theme nice and simple to let the gold tones pop as much as they can and draw attention to them. *All images taken from Pandora Australia.