Metal Allergies or Germs?

I've had a few customer's lately complain about being allergic to their platinum or gold rings. When a rash appears they were worried is it a metal allergy? Or were they sold an inferior product?


After years of wear, and if you purchased your ring from a reputable source this suspicion is often highly unlikely, a jeweler in good standing in the community is not going to risk his reputation selling bogus goods nor will he be in business long.

That leads us to metal allergies. It’s very unlikely to have allergies with either gold or platinum. However, sensitive people can have allergies to the alloys in gold. In most cases it’s an allergy to nickel. There are simple tests that a Dermatologist can perform to solve the mystery and see if it is an allergy to an alloy.

If you are able to wear a pair of inexpensive earrings with no problem
odds are you don't have a metal allergy. As a jeweler I find most people have skin irritation due to the debris that gathers in the nooks and grannies on the underside of a ring.

When the "suspected" ring or rings are examined in most cases they are dirty, some not having been cleaned for years. The biggest culprit to the itching and the red blisters on the skin is that germs and bacteria have found a perfect home in your rings. You've got dirt, dead skin cells, lotion, powder, last nights dinner residing in your ring, throw a little moisture in the mix and you've made a perfect habitat for a whole host of undesirables sitting next to your skin.

How to resolve this? Bring your jewelry to, Countryman's Village Jewelers (or a jeweler close to you) and have your rings professionally cleaned. We will completely and thoroughly clean all debris from your rings.

It's interesting how people will dismiss this as being the cause of their problem. Let me put it into prospective for you. Take a fork and eat a meal with it, leave it and the next day pick up that same fork and do the same thing, go out and garden with that fork, put some lotion on the fork with dusting powder, and eat off of it again do you think after a little while you could get sick from this fork? This is what we are doing with our rings. We wear them every day; we expose them to all types of things and we are surprised that they could be hosting germs.

Have a relationship with your jeweler have your rings professionally cleaned, it's a free service that we provide, take advantage of it. It makes your rings look fabulous it lets me examine them for possible wear issues and it eliminates those nasty germs, keeping rashes at bay.


Rhonda Irizarry
Countryman's Village Jewelers
www.countrymansvillage.com