Did you know.............

.... If you have a strand of natural pearls you need to treat them carefully! Don't get them wet - it will rot the thread, and penetrate into the holes in the pearls, damaging them. Also keep them away from perfume - it can damage the surface lustre. The best way to clean them is with a soft cloth, like microfibre, but not spectacle cloths, as they are impregnated with chemicals that will harm the pearls.

.... People have long thought that testing a gem by seeing if it will scratch glass is proof it is a diamond. In fact any stone that is harder than glass will scratch it - this would include topaz, beryl (eg emerald, aquamarine etc), and sapphire. There are white forms of all these gems, and they will all scratch glass. 

.... It is widely believed that if you wear a 9ct ring next to an 18ct ring then the 9ct one will wear away the 18ct one. This is completely wrong - each metal will always wear at it's characteristic rate, regardless of what is next to it. The truth is that the 9ct ring will RESIST wear better than the 18ct one, as it is harder.

.... Wearing your chains and bracelets while exercising will speed up the wear on the links. Dust between the links is abrasive, so running around and making your chains swing about will contribute to the wear on them and shorten their life.

 .... Contrary to popular belief, diamonds are not immune to damage - they are the hardest natural substance, but they are still originally a crystal, and if hit hard enough on the wrong angle it is quite possible to chip or even break them.

....Sometimes I see white gold rings that look like they are turning into yellow gold at the back after wearing them for a while - why does that happen? 

This is often seen in older white gold rings, or contemporary ones made from inferior overseas alloys. It happens because the white gold they are made from isn't all that white. This is especially noticeable with low-quality 18ct white golds from overseas. As 18ct gold is 75% pure yellow (24ct) gold, the manufacturers only have 25% of the total alloy to bleach it to white. This is done by using alloys like silver, nickel, platinum, or palladium. Cheap foreign white alloys tend to be  on the yellow side, whereas better quality local ones tend to be a little on the grey side - none are actually intensely white. Because of this, ALL white gold jewellery, of any carat, is rhodium plated. Rhodium is a platinum-family precious metal, and is intensely white, so the plating process is carried out to whiten and unify the colour of all white golds. However, as it is still only a plated layer, after a while it will wear off, most noticeably at the high-wear areas of the back of the band. This then exposes the yellowish colour of the underlying metal. As the remaining rhodium plating is so white, the contrast between it and the underlying metal is quite pronounced, making the metal look yellowish by comparison. However, re-polishing the ring and re-plating it will restore it back to it's new appearance.

....people often say "I've been wearing this bracelet for a while now, and it has stretched - it's longer and looser than it used to be. It must be faulty!" No it isn't - gold chains DO NOT STRETCH! The reason they lengthen isn't complicated. Look at any bracelet and count it's links - it's not uncommon for them to be made from 40 or more links. Each link has two ends, and the ends of the links wear after a time, from the abrasive nature of the dust and dirt that collects inside them. So if each end of each link wears by as little as 1/2mm, then you have 40 links which total 80 ends, and each end wears by 1/2 mm - that means 80 ends x 1/2mm = 40mm! With as little as 1/2mm wear on each end of each link the bracelet will lengthen by 40mm!