How to care for your silver jewellery?

Caring for your silver jewellery is essential to have a longer life without tarnishing or without losing its sheen.  Here are some of the tips and guidelines for your ready reference:

Storage:

Please store your jewellery creations in plastic ziplocks provided and not in fancy looking handkerchiefs or traditional wooden boxes. It helps preventing exposure from moisture. Avoid keeping your jewellery in direct sunlight or in humid places too.

Care:

Avoid direct contact of your jewellery with any chemicals such as perfumes, soaps, moisturizers, soaps, extreme temperatures, and anything that is acidic in nature. These chemicals can cause discoloration and / or chemical reactions that may harm the products.

Cleaning:

Silver jewellery is prone to oxidization (blackening) when it is exposed to humidity in atmosphere. This will occur in regular usage of the jewellery and it is a normal phenomenon. You can use silver cleaning cloths, or silver cleaning solutions to remove the excess oxidization. Be gentle while cleaning any jewellery as rough handling may leave permanent scratches on the surface.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by आद्या | 92.5 Certified Silver Jewellery | Handmade in India (@houseofaadyaa)

Eliminating Breakage:

Your silver jewellery is a delicate creation and if not handled gently and appropriately, it may break. We recommend keeping all jewellery creations in separate ziplock bags and in additional boxes/ pouches provided by us to avoid entangling and/or breakage. Repairing of partially/fully broken jewellery creations is next to impossible. If you are not sure about the mechanism of wearing a particular creation, please reach out to us before trying it on.

Plating / re-plating:

Gold plating is a chemical process and it would fade over a period due to moisture / humidity / extreme temperatures. If you need to plate the creation again, kindly get in touch with us and we will be happy to do it for you for a nominal charge. You can also reach out to your trusted local jeweller for plating.

We provide a jewellery care tag along with silver purity certificate along with all our orders. We strongly recommend to adhere to the guidelines given in it for long life of your jewellery. In case of any queries, our helpline team will be happy to support you through text / voice call / video call.

How to check if the Silver Jewellery you are buying is authentic?

Background:

Silver jewellery is been made and sold across the globe for centuries. The methods used earlier were raw and would not really ensure the necessary quality standards as such. Methods and percentage of silver used in jewellery have evolved over a period and now there is a consensus in understanding purity benchmarks for silver jewellery.

Jewellery creations that contain a minimum 92.5% silver in them are considered as ‘Sterling Silver Creations’ or more generically ‘Pure Silver Creations’. Remaining 7.5% in these products is made up of alloys that are essential to give strength to the jewellery. It is not technically impossible to increase silver percentage upto 99% as well; however, these products will become extremely soft and cannot be worn daily. Most pooja ornaments / pooja essentials are made with 99% purity of silver.

Current process:

Some of the artisans / companies stamp “92.5” behind silver jewellery creations denoting that they have a minimum 92.5% silver in them. However, there is no sanctity in this process as anyone can put a stamp like this.

Development:

In India, Bureau of Indian Standards i.e. BIS (Hallmarking) has published regulations on 14^th June 2018 to curb such practices across jewellery and other sectors too. If a company/individual complies with the standards, then their products can be hallmarked with unique identifiers such as company logo through authorised hallmarking centres approved by Government of India.

Referring to silver jewellery standards under this set of regulations, IS 2112, is applicable and silver jewellery makers are required to list themselves with BIS to get unique license number to denote the making & distribution for sterling silver (92.5% silver) creations. This listing process is critical and unless the company/artisan follows the quality standards fully, license is not issued.

House of Aadyaa (Legal Name: Aadyaa Originals Private Limited) has always created all of it’s products with strict quality standards and has obtained license numbers from BIS i.e.

“HM/C-7590712019” and “HM/C-7590712120”.

Based on these licenses, we provide silver purity certificates to all our patrons. Also, we have started the process of hallmarking all our products with our unique identifiers. We are expecting to roll this process out to all our products in coming few months.

Conclusion:

House of Aadyaa has always been honest and transparent with its patrons. And quality and purity of silver used in our creations are no exception to it. We are happy to get any of our product lab tested again from any government approved laboratory for purity of silver used. Further, if any of our patrons’ desires to see the licenses issued to us by BIS, we are happy to furnish them.