How to care for gold, diamonds and coloured stones.
Put your jewellery on last, after perfume, lotion and hairspray, and take it off first. Cosmetics and fragrance dull gold and can damage softer stones over time.
Warm water, a drop of mild soap and a soft brush is enough for most pieces. Rinse, then dry with a soft lint-free cloth. Never use bleach, chlorine or an abrasive cleaner: they attack gold alloys and the settings that hold your stones.
Store each piece separately, in the pouch or box it arrived in. Gold is a soft metal and pieces stored loose together will scratch one another. Diamonds will scratch everything else you own, including other diamonds.
Remove your jewellery before swimming, showering, exercising, cleaning, or sleeping. Chlorine and salt water are especially hard on gold.
Coloured stones and pieces with pavé settings benefit from being checked periodically, so loose stones are caught before they are lost. For a professional clean, a polish, or to have settings checked, contact payments@ldkjewels.co.za.
Every LDK piece is covered for twelve months from the day it reaches you, against faults in the materials or the making. If a claw fails, a setting gives way or a solder joint opens because of how the piece was made, we repair or replace it at no cost to you.
At around six months, bring your piece back to us. We clean and polish it and check the settings while it is with us, free of charge. Gold is soft and claws move with wear, so this is the check that catches a loose stone before it is lost.
Ordinary wear is not a manufacturing fault, and neither is anything that happens to a piece after it leaves us. That means scratches and thinning from daily wear, knocks that bend a shank or a claw, damage from chlorine, salt water, bleach or cosmetics, stones lost to impact or to claws worn down over time, and loss or theft.
If another jeweller works on an LDK piece, the warranty on that piece ends.
Email payments@ldkjewels.co.za with your order number and a photograph. Proof of purchase is required. We will tell you whether it is a warranty repair before you send anything back.
A piece that arrives damaged or not as described is a different matter, and is covered under Returns and Exchanges rather than here.
We service the pieces we make for as long as you own them. Cleaning, polishing, re-tipping claws and resizing are charged once the warranty has run, and we quote before we start any of it.