We all have projects that we know we should finish, but we dread doing. My most recent one was a pile of silver I needed to polish.
I like polishing silver, but these items were badly tarnished, and it took me almost an hour to get one large piece done. I had no desire to stand in the kitchen while cleaning silver I hadn’t used in years (thus the tarnish.)
It turned out that the silver I had kept in its box wasn’t as bad as the items that were exposed to the air. I decided that yesterday was the day to tackle this chore, but instead of standing in the kitchen, I pulled up a stool to the bathroom counter. After fifteen minutes of using silver polish (which was probably a couple of decades-old), I knew I’d never finish this way.
Lately, I’ve been finding a lot of handy advice from YouTube, so, at wit’s end, I googled how to polish silver. Real Simple had a video that suggested I use aluminum foil, baking soda, salt, and hot water. The silver in the video basically untarnished itself. I was skeptical but figured I would lose nothing but time by trying this technique. Also, I was willing to do anything that wasn’t what I was currently doing.
To my surprise and extreme pleasure, it worked.
Below you can see my “before and after” photos. I poured hot water all over my counter multiple times, so not only was my silver polished in record time, but my counter is super clean.
Why does this work? According to the Philadelphia Museum of Art,
This type of reaction is called an electrochemical reaction because a tiny electric current flows between the silver and aluminum when the two are in contact and immersed in a baking soda solution. The addition of the baking soda improves the ease with which the electrons move between the silver and aluminum.
Wow. Very cool. I’m glad I went looking for a different technique, and I’m glad it worked. Now I can photograph these pieces and try to sell them on Facebook Marketplace. Someone else can polish them next time.
