Maintaining your jewelry to keep that look you bought it for is just a matter of routine care and cleaning. Your jewelry is fragile in many respects and needs to be treated with gentle kindness and affection if you wish to continue your loving relationship with it.

How and where you store your jewelry is of the utmost importance, whether it is expensive gold and diamond pieces, or just costume ones that may not have much value to anyone else but you. A velvet or satin type material is best for any container you may keep your jewelry in.

Material that sheds any type of lint or fuzz is not good because it can get embedded in the small cracks and crevices of your jewelry settings. These little particles can be hard to get out if embedded deep enough.

Laying large bulkier necklaces and bracelets flat in your container is the best way to store these. It will keep them from bending or getting kinks in them. The gentler you are with these items the better. Do not lay them on top of one another. They can become entangled, not to mention the way one piece can scratch and mar another one.

Rings, watches and brooches should be treated in this same manner. The pieces of jewelry that are best hung from hooks, are beads and those tiny gold or silver chains we love to wear with our favorite pendants. Nothing is more tedious, aggravating, or damaging to a chain and us, is having one all knotted up.

Nothing is more fatal to delicate jewelry than being thrown all together in a box, never mind what is does to us when we have to scratch through a jewelry nightmare to find the piece we want, only to discover it is bent, broken, or scratched beyond repair.

The second part of jewelry care is regular cleaning. It gets dirty easier than you think. Body oil, hand lotions, cooking, and many other everyday things can cause it to become dull and lifeless looking. Use cleaners especially for jewelry, and you can use a soft toothbrush to gently remove small particles of debris.

Never clean your jewelry over a sink. Be very careful with opals. It may be best to have them professionally cleaned. An experienced and qualified jeweler can your make your pieces look just as good as when you got them