You open the drawer after a few months and the chain has gone the colour of a storm. Not dirty exactly. Darker, and duller, and somehow older than when you put it away.
Nothing has gone wrong. That is silver doing the one thing silver does, and it is worth understanding rather than fearing, because once you know what causes it you also know the four or five small things that prevent nearly all of it.
It is not the silver. It is the copper.
Here is the part that explains everything else.
Pure silver is beautiful and almost useless. It is soft enough to bend in the hand, so a ring made of it would lose its shape in a season. To make silver wearable you alloy it — sterling is 92.5% silver and 7.5% another metal, almost always copper, and that is exactly what the 925 stamp means.
The copper is what hardens it. The copper is also what tarnishes.
What you are seeing when a chain goes dark is not dirt and not damage. It is a thin film of silver sulphide, formed where the metal met sulphur compounds in ordinary air. It sits on the surface. It has taken nothing away from the piece underneath. That is why a cloth removes it and why the silver beneath is exactly as it was.
So tarnish is not a defect in sterling. It is the receipt for the hardness that makes sterling wearable at all — and any seller who treats it as a flaw is either confused about the metal or hoping you are.
Which is why "tarnish-free sterling silver" cannot be true
You will find that phrase, and things like it, all over this category.
As written, it is a contradiction. If a piece is genuinely sterling, it contains copper; if it contains copper, it can tarnish. There is no formulation of 925 that escapes this, because the thing that would escape it — pure silver — is too soft to be the thing you wanted.
So when a shop writes tarnish-free, one of three things is happening. The piece is plated with something else and the shop has not said so, which is the most common. Or the piece is not sterling at all. Or nobody in the chain checked, and the phrase was copied from the listing above.
The first case is the interesting one, because the plating is usually real and usually good — and by not naming it, the shop turns something worth knowing into a claim you cannot check.
The useful question is the same one as always: not what is this made of, but what is over it, and who is telling me.
What actually keeps silver bright
Not the silver. Something on top of it.
Rhodium is the answer almost every good piece of white jewelry has arrived at. It is a metal from the platinum family — rare, hard, brilliantly white — and it does not react with the sulphur that tarnishes copper. Laid over sterling in a layer thinner than you can see, it puts a door between the air and the alloy. The air never reaches the copper. The piece does not tarnish slowly; it does not tarnish at all.
That is a strong sentence, so here is the limit that belongs beside it.
Rhodium is a plating, and platings wear. Not evenly — at the places that rub. The underside of a ring where it meets the next finger. The back of a clasp. The inside of a bangle at the wrist bone. Where the layer finally thins through, the sterling beneath behaves like sterling: it tarnishes, ordinarily and reversibly, and a cloth brings it back.
This is also why a piece you wear constantly stays brighter than one you keep — skin and sleeve polish it daily, and the film never gets a chance to build. The drawer is harder on silver than the wrist is.
And it is why the honest version of the claim has two halves. It will not tarnish is true, and while the plating holds is the part that makes it true rather than merely persuasive.
What is on ours
What we counted · 15 September 2026
- 82sterling silver 925 pieces in the shop
- 75rhodium plated over the silver
- 8with gold-tone as the outer layer instead
- 82whose product page names which of the two it is
Method: counted in our own catalogue on the date above, by the two people who buy it. We date these counts because stock moves; the product pages are always current. What does not move is the last line — every piece says what is on it, and if we ever cannot say, we will say that instead.
Every one of those pages carries a line called Plating, sitting directly under the material, and it says what is over the silver. Not tucked into a description, not implied by a photograph — its own line, as on the Three Centimetre Hoops, because it is the thing that decides how the piece behaves once it is yours.
How to keep it, and how to bring it back
The whole routine, and it really is this short:
- A soft cloth, occasionally. Not silver polish — see below.
- A dry drawer. Air is the enemy; a closed box or a small bag is better than an open dish.
- Take it off for chlorine and seawater. This one is not about tarnish. Chlorine attacks the alloy itself, and that damage does not polish out.
- Perfume, hairspray and lotion first, jewelry after. Half a minute of patience, and it is the single most effective habit here.
- Do not store pieces touching each other. They scratch long before they ever dull.
On silver polish, and this is the tip nobody selling it will give you. The dips and creams sold for tarnished silver are abrasive by design — they work by taking a microscopically thin layer off. On solid sterling that is fine. On a rhodium-plated piece you are sanding the very layer that was protecting it. A dry cloth is the right tool, and for a plated piece it is the only one you need.
If a plated piece does eventually wear through and dull at the edges, that is not the end of it: any jeweller can re-plate it, and it is neither expensive nor unusual. It is maintenance, like resoling a good shoe. The whole of our routine is on the care page.
One more thing worth knowing about the stamp
925 is a claim about the alloy underneath, not about the surface. A piece can be honestly stamped 925 and be rhodium plated, or gold plated over the silver, or entirely bare — all three are sterling and all three are correctly marked.
Which is why the stamp alone does not tell you how the piece will behave, and why a product page that gives you only the stamp has told you half the story. Ours name the plating on its own line, directly under the material, because that is the line that decides what happens to it in your drawer.
Where we stand on it
We would rather explain a metal than promise around it. Silver tarnishes; ours mostly does not, and the reason is a layer of rhodium that will one day wear thin, and when it does, a cloth and a jeweller between them will fix it completely.
None of that is dramatic. It is just what is true, and we have found that saying the whole of it costs us less than the alternative — because the alternative is that you find out later, on your own, and wonder what else we rounded off.