Style Guides

How to Clean Pearls and Care for Them the Right Way

How do you clean pearls without damaging them? A soft cloth does most of the work. Here's how to clean, store and wear real pearls, and the things that ruin them.

How to Tell if Pearls Are Real: 8 Tests, and What Pearls Are Worth

Are your pearls real? Most fakes give themselves away in under a minute. Here are eight simple tests, what fakes are made of, and what real pearls are actually worth.

How to Clean Gold Jewelry: A Guide to Every Type

Gold doesn't tarnish, so a dull gold piece is telling you about what sits underneath it rather than about the gold. Solid, vermeil, plated, filled, rose and white gold all want a different hand. He...

How to Clean Gold-Plated Jewelry Without Damaging It

Most gold-plated jewelry doesn't wear out, it gets cleaned out. Nearly every cleaning tip online was written for solid gold, and on a plated piece toothpaste, baking soda and ultrasonic cleaners al...

What Does 925 Mean on Jewelry? Every Silver Stamp Explained

925 means 92.5% pure silver, and it's simply another way of writing sterling. The useful part is everything around it: the marks that contain 925 without meaning what you'd assume, what a stamp is ...

White Gold vs Silver: What's the Real Difference?

They look the same in the case and age completely differently. Sterling silver's colour is the metal, so it tarnishes and polishes back. White gold's colour is a rhodium coating, so it wears and ne...

What Is White Gold? Karats, Stamps and the Catch

White gold is real gold, alloyed with pale metals and then plated in rhodium to make it properly white. The gold is the object; the colour you fell for is a coating a fraction of a micron thick, an...

The Most Expensive Jewelry Ever Sold

There are two kinds of number in this subject and only one is real. Auction results happened, because two people bid against each other in public. Chain prices mostly didn't. Here are the records t...

Gold or Silver Jewelry: Which One Suits You?

Most advice on this treats it like a personality test. It isn't. Both metals suit most men, the question worth asking is which piece rather than which metal, and wearing the two together now reads ...

How to Clean Earring Holes (And the Earrings That Go In Them)

Earrings sit against skin all day, which is why they build up faster than anything else you wear, and why the post and the back are always dirtier than the part you can see. Here's the ten-minute m...