I
love helping people build their jewelry wardrobe. As you might imagine, “building a jewelry
wardrobe” doesn’t mean buying everything in sight, anymore than most people
would take that approach when it comes to clothing or furniture. We buy things we love that complement things
we already have, fill in gaps, and sometimes we decide we want to expand a bit,
too. Nothing wrong with that.
Let’s talk about taking care of the jewelry you already own and love.
Part
One: Taking Care of Your Jewelry: A Little Maintenance
Goes a Long Way.
When
you have things you love, you take care of them. In the case of clothing, that means a regular
trip to the dry cleaner and shoe repair.
Furniture doesn’t ask much—a shine now and then, perhaps a little T.LC. (“tender
loving care”) to repair a nick on the surface.
Jewelry
not only attracts attention when you wear it—especially you :>; it also needs
attention at home. Let’s take a look at
jewelry set with prongs. Well, you can take a look at it—the light shines
clear through it. That’s the magic.
But
where a diamond or other gemstone with a bezel setting is protected on all
sides (or, with the half-bezel, the stone is partially protected) from the
slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, those prongs we were just talking
about don’t cover all that much of the stone.
At
the beginning, that’s not a problem, assuming you bought your jewelry from a reputable
source: the prongs in the setting hug
the stone. If the prong jewelry in
question is a pendant, you’ll be fine for the foreseeable future.
But
think about a ring. Some people sleep
with their rings on. Most people wear
them at work. So you turn in bed and the
prong catches on the sheet, just a little, and you gently pull it back and
maybe in the morning look, and it seems fine.
Or you’re talking with John or Kim about that project and your hand
bumps against the phone as you’re checking something.
A
fly on the wall would tell you that both times the tip of the prong was bent,
and in one case part of it broke off.
Tiny. Easy to miss.
Another
night tossing and turning, more projects at work, games with the kids,
presentations, camping—so many opportunities for the tip of the prong to snap
off and the prong itself to get yanked (just a bit each time), and then “Where
did the stone go?”
Tip: Write the date you bought your prong jewelry
(or the date you received it) on your calendar.
Put it in the media you use for keeping track of appointments. Now add a reminder every three to six months
(depending on how active you are) to have the prongs checked to make sure they’re
intact and see if they might need to be tightened or the tips or whole prongs
might need to be replaced. (You don’t want to
overdo the tightening—remember, the prongs put pressure on the stone—but you
want to be sure the prongs are strong and secure.)
Enjoy! Prong jewelry does require attention, but
seeing the light through the stone—doesn’t that make it worth a little effort?
©2014
Laynie Tzena.
Posts
