Polishing Silver with Toothpaste

The majority of home improvement blogs tend to present the viewer with a very carefully constructed representation of continuity. In short, most blogs show a visitor something that the blogger has found which has been overwhelmingly positive; a force in their life has been discovered and utilized in way that makes not only home improvement, but life in general a more noble and harmonious pursuit.

We, however, prefer a more honest approach and are more than willing to familiarize you, dear reader, with our cock ups, as John Cleese might call them. We want to tell you when we screw up, because we think mistakes in homemaking are productive. Mistakes help us learn and by sharing our failures with you all, we can help you learn in a more honest fashion.

So here is an epic fail:

It began so innocently, with a beautiful, sunny Sunday afternoon of thrift store shopping. My betrothed and I found what might be the best antique store in Austin, a little place called Out of the Past, after the masterpiece of a film noir with your favorite bad boy and mine, Robert Mitchum. We paid this place a visit, met the store’s wonderful proprietress, and purchased two beautiful silver pieces for use in our upcoming wedding. As with most vintage silver one may find, these pieces were tarnished. As we were leaving the store the owner called after us, “Now don’t go buying any of that silver polish! It smells! Use toothpaste instead.”

Well, I attacked this project full bore, thinking it would give me an opportunity to share a thrifty tip with our readers. Unfortunately, I was wrong. Yes, a man was wrong. Somehow the planets aligned and the forces of nature turned against the human race: a man was wrong. The toothpaste did not yield any results. I then tried soaking the silver in warm water and baking soda. Again, nothing.

The picture above serves as both a before and an after. I did manage to remove one  microscopic spot, but I would assume that scrubbing furiously for an extended period of time using oatmeal could have produced the same result. (No, I haven’t read any evidence that oatmeal can polish silver.)

The moral of this story, unfortunately, is that some home remedies are sheer quackery, like the nineteenth century elixirs of life sold at medicine shows across the U.S. This did not work, so by all means, use your toothpaste and baking soda for, respectively, personal hygiene and troublesome stomach ailments, not for imperfections of silver.