- Wear it! The natural oils in your skin help to keep it shiny & bright. Sunlight and air speed up the oxidation of silver. When you are not wearing your jewelry, keeping all pieces in sealed plastic pouch or plastic container with a lid will slow down this process. Pearls need air, if your piece is created with pearls allow some airspace.

Having grown up immersed in south Asian culture, I came to be familiar with jewelry as a standard accessory and essential part of a woman’s expressive identity. In my culture, women adorn themselves with precious jewels as readily as one would put on their wristwatch here in the west. Upon moving to the United States as a young woman, I discovered that jewelry is looked upon as a luxury, usually bestowed upon a woman by her significant other, and only on special or rare occasions.

Guys, this guide’s for you! So you’ve finally decided to take the plunge and propose to your sweetheart. Now comes the hard part: choosing her engagement ring.

An engagement ring is probably the second-most important purchase you’ll ever make (your house being the most important), so you need to choose wisely. This guide will help you make that choice and will hopefully result in you wooing her with the perfect engagement ring.

Our obsession with the yellow beauty of gold has led us to want to decorate our bodies with things made from it and we imagine ourselves made more beautiful and desirable with the wearing of a dangling earring or a gold medallion pendant. Gold has helped us build up a very viable trade in wearable gold jewelry because of its properties and the fact that it mixes readily with other metals, like copper, which render soft gold harder and more durable. Gold is a great mineral metal for making jewelry as it never tarnishes, has the properties of ductility, (can be beaten flat - one ounce can be beaten out to 300 square feet), sectility, (can be cut into thin slices), malleability, (can be stretched into a thin wire) and has a high density.