Buy or DIY --->Cleaning Your Silver Jewelry

I recently moved from a framed jewelry holder to a more cozy cloth container as I was seeing a lot of my silver jewelry look like they'd been in a war when I hadn't worn the piece in quite some time. As I saw the jewelry become more tarnished, I searched for ways to clean the earrings and necklaces that had lost their shine. There are a few different tutorials that I found that were simple and super affordable but did they work as well as commercial wipes or cleaner that you can buy almost anywhere? I decide to do a quick comparison so I would know what to do in the future.

The most common tutorial online to make your own silver cleaner is a quick combination of salt, baking soda, piping hot water and aluminum foil. There are many different tutorials for many different solutions but this one seemed to be the most commonly recommended.

I left the earring submerged and went on to cleaning the other earring with the silver wipes.The brand I bought was Weiman Silver Wipes, retailing at $7.00-8.00, and pulled out of the container much like baby wipes or clorox wipes do. With a bit of scrubbing, I went to work on the other earring and saw immediate result. In fact, I was able to remove the tarnish right away, then just made sure I didn't miss any spots.

I took the DIY earring out of the solution and dried it. Though I do care that the DIY version is good for the environment and non-toxic, it just didn't work that well. There is supposed to be some sort of reaction that causes the tarnish to fade away but I found that even with some elbow grease, the baking soda/ salt mixture just didn't do the trick and one earring was left looking dingier than the other. The Weiman wipes on the other hand, almost immediately began to work. Not a single piece of my jewelry is still tarnished, because that is what I used to clean the rest. While I will still try some other at home solutions, these wipes are great to have on hand and will be my go to for stubborn tarnish on my preciousessss.

What do you use to clean your silver? Do you BUY or DIY?