There are a million jewelry cleaning tricks out there – from baby toothbrushes to the trusted drop of dish soap in a bowl of warm water, to vodka and even ketchup. But any jewelry lover should know how it easy it is to harm your treasures by using the wrong method, especially if you’re talking about older pieces or more delicate gemstones. With a little knowledge and the right jewelry cleaner, you can keep your collection as safe and shining as it deserves.

My current go-to methods are a polishing cloth and a warm bowl of water with a drop or two of dish soap dissolved in it, but I’ve been looking for a more effective approach (that polishing cloth really takes a lot of elbow grease). When Goddard’s approached me about possibly featuring their jewelry cleaner, I was very intrigued.

Goddard’s as a company has a history as old as some if jewelry I’m hoping to clean with it: the chemist Joseph Goddard developed his first silver polish in the 1830’s; by the 1885 American Exposition, his perfected products took home 6 gold medals. Since then, the company’s two jewelry cleaners – the traditional and the foam – have been further developed into the ideal versions of themselves that they are today.

While both cleaners are safe, the foam is utterly gentle: it’s even safe enough to be used on pieces with watch movements and glued-in settings.

The main reason that some kinds of jewelry cleaner can be damaging to fragile gemstones (like opals and emeralds) is that they contain ammonia. Goddard’s contains no ammonia, which makes it safe for even paste and pearls.

When the lovely folks of Goddard’s jewelry cleaner approached me about featuring their product, I said that it sounded wonderful but that I would need to try it out myself before I could recommend it to anyone. They were kind enough to send me some samples so that I could perform do a test run.

This is a piece my husband bought for me in our first year or so of dating. It’s a piece of Art Deco camphor glass (from around the 1920’s) and it’s beautiful, but it gets tarnished quickly. Normally, cleaning it involves going to town on it with a polishing cloth until my fingers are sore.

The decision to clean an antique piece of jewelry is a very individual one: some people prefer to maintain the original antique patine. For me, it varies by piece. I like this particular piece to be nice and clean, otherwise the designs in the delicate swirls of filigree are hard to see.

Today, I used Goddard’s Foam cleaner on the piece before taking a polishing cloth to it. I just sprayed the piece with the foam cleaner (which is really delightfully foamy), let it sit for one minute, then rinsed and patted the piece dry before giving it a once-over with my trusty polishing cloth.

Using the foam cleaner before polishing made a huge difference: the grime wiped right off instead of needing to be rubbed and rubbed to coax it off of the filigree. The whole process was quicker, easier, and more effective.

I was also impressed with the amount of grime that came off of my pendant. It had only been a couple of months since I last cleaned this piece.

You see? That’s from one swipe. Super impressive, as I’m sure you know if you’ve spent much time working your fingers to the bone trying to put some shine back on your tarnished silver.

Normally, I clean a lot of my pieces at once every few months and it leaves my hands black with grime and numb from polishing. I’m excited to have found something safe and effective that will speed up the process – I look forward to trying this magic jewelry cleaner on more of my treasures.

This post is brought to you by Goddard’s.