Hi Taylor,

Before you use the sunshine cloth on your old strand of pearls it helps to give them a light scrubbing in salt slush, rinse carefully in chlorine-free water. For rinsing, take a jug of Brita or Pür-filtered water and a large cup, put pearls in cup, fill up with water, swish around, pour water away, repeat 4 times. Then refill the cup one last time and let the pearls sit in the water for a day to rehydrate after the salt bath. When you use the sunshine cloth on them after that, they will come out sparkling like new. This method is of course only recommended for thick-nacre cultured pearls with no surface treatments. If you use it on latter-day akoyas or polymer-coated freshwater pearls, you just polish the nacre and/or enhancements off the bead. This cleaning method is preferably followed by restringing.

Zeide