Cleaning Vintage Copper Jewelry
Have you ever passed up some beautiful vintage jewelry because it was tarnished or corroded and you just were not sure what to do to restore it?
A few weeks ago I was in the same predicament.
I found a beautiful pair of vintage mid century rhinestone copper earrings . . . BUT the copper had oxidized, meaning it was darker in places and there were areas of that iconic blue-green color you may be familiar with from your pennies!
I had no idea how to move forward, but they were beautiful earrings and they were not too expensive. So I figured they would be great pieces with which for me to learn!
How to Naturally Clean Copper
Despite having no experience whatsoever in removing the oxidation on copper, I thought this would be best to try with ingredients we tend to have at home. I am not a fan of heavily scented cleaning agents and I prefer to use more natural methods when possible. Besides, chemistry is fun!
While looking online for a recipe to follow, I found a ton of different methods to clean your copper cookware, but nothing about jewelry specifically. But copper is copper, so I didn’t think it would matter much. I will say, I did have some minor concerns regarding how the cleaning solution I chose would impact both the faux pearls and the rhinestones within their settings. I chose the method I thought would be most effective, but also least likely to harm those pearls and rhinestones.
The recipe essentially is to mix vinegar, salt and flour together into a paste. All of the recipes were for cleaning large copper pots so they called for a lot of ingredients. While the ratios were slightly different from person to person, the overall average of these mixes was about 1 part flour to 1 part salt, plus enough vinegar to form a nice paste.
Because I was cleaning such small copper earrings, I thought it a waste to follow the full recipes. So I decided to scale mine down significantly, following the ratio I thought was most common between all the other recipes. Additionally, I actually cannot eat gluten so the flour I have at home, and what I used here was Bob's Red Mill GF Blend (you can buy it HERE). I found no recipe or attempts to clean copper using gluten free flour online. So I decided to be the guinea-pig to determine if this recipe would work differently.
The Recipe
I mixed 1 TBSP of salt with 1 TBSP of GF flour and then added vinegar to form a paste. At first I added way too much vinegar, and it made more of a soup-like consistency. But then I tried again and got a good paste that coated the earrings nicely.
After making sure the earrings were fully coated, I used a toothbrush to gently rub around the areas where oxidation was the worst - right around the rhinestones - to ensure the paste was embedded into all the tiny grooves. I let the earrings sit in the paste for a while (about a few minutes) to try and let the cleaning solution do its thing. With a nice rinse under warm water and some very light rubbing with the toothbrush, everything pretty much looked shiny and new - save for a few areas around the rhinestone settings.
It took a few more attempts of coating the earrings with the paste and rubbing them with a toothbrush before I was satisfied I got most of the visible blue-green off of the settings. They are not perfectly new again, but they are pretty close!
The only negative to this cleaning method is that I did have to re-glue one rhinestone back in place with jewelers glue (you can find it HERE) as it came loose when I was brushing. But honestly, I don’t think any other cleaning method would have made this less likely to dislodge a rhinestone as I would have had to use a toothbrush for any method in order to get in between the settings.
The Finished Product!
For the most part this technique worked really well! I am honestly really surprised how much of the oxidation (especially the blue-green around the rhinestones) was removed with products I had in my kitchen! And not only that, it polished the copper and gave it a really nice overall shine as well! I was a bit worried that the GF flour would change how the recipe worked given the different ingredients and all, but it didn’t seem to make a difference at all!
I will definitely be trying this method again in the future for other vintage copper goodies I find! And now that I am a bit more confident with jewelry, I will have to figure out ways to clean other metals used in vintage jewelry!!
