Loading blog content, please wait...
By Hey June
Why Your Earrings Tarnish and What Actually Slows It Down Metal wears. That's just the honest truth, and no piece of jewelry on earth gets to skip it. B...
Metal wears. That's just the honest truth, and no piece of jewelry on earth gets to skip it. But how fast your earrings dull or darken?
That has waaaay more to do with your daily life than with anything wrong with the jewelry.
Your skin composition plays a bigger role than most people realize. Body chemistry is sooooo different from one person to the next! Whether your earrings stay bright for years or start to shift a little sooner comes down partly to your genes and partly to plain old luck.
Where you live matters too. Warm, humid air breaks down metal faster than cold, dry air. So the same pair might behave one way in July and a totally different way in January.
Then there's everything your earrings actually touch. Water, perfumes, lotions, chlorine... they all take their toll over time. None of this means you're doing anything wrong, girl!
It just means metal responds to its environment, and yours is doing its normal thing.
This is where the metal you started with does a lot of the heavy lifting. Every piece we carry is 14k gold filled, sterling silver, or vermeil. All of them are built to last waaay longer than gold plated.
Gold filled is a thick layer of gold bonded through heat to a brass core, so it doesn't flake off the way a sprayed-on plating does. Sterling silver is hypoallergenic and durable too! It does oxidize a bit quicker than gold filled though, so it likes a little more attention.
I'm about as low maintenance as it gets with my own jewelry. I sleep and shower in my huggies every single day, and I still get months and sometimes years out of them.
The single easiest thing you can do? Dry your earrings after they get wet. Water is powerful when it sits on metal, so a quick pat after a shower or a swim goes a loooong way.
When you're not wearing a pair, tuck it into an airtight bag. This one is especially worth it for sterling silver! It stays brighter when air isn't reaching it around the clock.
And clean them when they need it. Warm water and a drop of mild dish soap like Dawn brings most pieces right back to life. A soft anti-tarnishing cloth wipes gold and silver clean in seconds too.
If you live in your favorite pair the way I do, a little wear over the long haul is totally normal and totally expected. Take those pieces off at night, store them in an airtight bag, and you'll stretch their life even further.
Nobody at Hey June can promise any single piece against every condition life throws at it. But here's what we can tell you! Gold filled and sterling silver sit right in the sweet spot of high quality, long-lasting metal that a little care keeps looking fresh for a good, long while.