Love your gold jewelry? Please remove it when hot tubbing!

Jewelers are, in my opinion, so very lucky. Time may march on, traditions may change, technological advances continue to emerge…but it seems humans will always have an enduring love affair with jewelry. If you don’t want anything to ruin that jewelry love affair, do your precious baubles a favor and take them off when you hot tub.

Several years ago the firm Hoover & Strong, a wholesale jewelry manufacturer, studied the results of chlorine and bromine on gold jewelry. In the test, a 14k nickel white gold ring setting was immersed in various types of chlorine, including hot tub chlorine and bromine. The goal was to find out the effects of these compounds specifically on a ring with stone settings. The result of the study found that a gold ring would lose a stone from the ring or expect prongs to break in the following time frame:

  • Chlorine—Prong failure would occur after 312 hours (about 156 days).
  • Bromine—Prong failure would occur after 384 hours (about 192 days).

For the purpose of this experiment, chlorine and bromine was maintained in the water at 5 ppm, and the ring was exposed for 2 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Obviously most of us aren’t going to soak in our hot tub for two hours every day of the year. However it is clear that, while all the fabulous benefits of hot tub use may be undeniable for human beings, it is definitely not so for the human being’s jewelry!

The study also recommended removal of jewelry when cleaning with any household laundry and cleaning products, and to NEVER clean rings with bleach.

Ultimately, we’d recommend you do your precious trinkets a favor and remove them before every visit to the hot tub. That will certainly allow you to have a happy soak!