I used to work at a jewelry store. Jewelry stores are the type of place where fingerprints and streaks can ruin a sale. People like to see things as they best appear. A fingerprint on a diamond can easily hide its true beauty. A smudge on the showcase and you may as well have a portable toilet in the middle of the floor.
This one time a customer came in complaining the diamond ring we sold her husband was fake. She said the diamond didn't shine like it used to. She'd only had it a few weeks. It must be fake, like how fake gold turns skin green. Only her understanding was that a fake diamond loses its sparkle. I'm not even sure how you'd go about giving a diamond artificial sparkle. Like magic you can use lights to dress diamonds up a bit, but start applying stuff to the surface of a diamond and you may as well throw a robe around Michaelangelo's David.
In fact, the best way to sell a diamond is to let the customer see it in the sunlight. Sunlight won't give it a tan, but it'll tone up the diamond. Make it slimmer looking in its dress. All the right curves pop out so it looks bustier in all the right ways. It just shouts "I'm beautiful inside and out". That's what jewelry's all about. It's a beauty contest.
The way we'd clean jewels is with hot water. Steam is the best remedy for a dirty jewel. Something about the mist seems to put the spirit back into it. Or maybe it's more like a spa treatment. It wipes away not the dirt, but those achy feelings that make you feel old and decrepid.
Sometimes the steam treatment would take too long on its own. I once had a woman hand me an ivory Buddha she wore around her neck. I have no idea what was caked all over this little Buddha but it was gross. Black, globby. It was all over. The dirt was like butter that had melted into every nook and cranny of her fat little muffin. I figured this Buddha wasn't the enlightened one, but more the wallowing in pig shit variety. I almost threw up as I carried Buddha to the back room. If this were a mobster flick, I'd have just shot the bastard in the head before he even turned around.
I stuck that little Buddha into the utrasonic. That's like a hot tub for jewelry. You leave the item or items in a special jewelry solution. The ultrasonic vibrates the solution back and forth at a rapid pace, similar to an electric toothbrush. It gets in all those little places a human finger can't fit.
Unfortunately, ivory is one of those pieces of jewelry that doesn't respond to heat very well. It cracks like hatching eggs in the heat but without any chicks on the inside. I kept praying back there. To my God. To Jesus. I asked Jesus not to let Buddha's head fall off. How the hell would I put it head back on? Superglue could do the trick, but he'd have a scar forever like Frankenstein's monster. I could picture them calling this mishap Grabowski's Buddha if the head fell off. Or worse. What if his trademark potbelly just slipped right off? She asked me to clean it, not put it on a diet.
Fortunately for me, I rounded up an old toothbrush. I could dip the brush in the hot solution and not overcook the ivory. The bristles do the trick though you can't rub too hard. We're not talking teeth here. We're talking ivory. I succeeded in restoring Buddha to his unnatural white self. The guy was Chinese. They don't have white skin. The whole piece stank of racism to me. I wonder if she even considered the green jade Buddha that must have been on sale next to it wherever in the Caribbean or Asia she purchased this guy. These things always come in a variety of colors. And jade is more of a Chinese novelty than ivory.
The Buddha victory was a long time ago. I'm still waiting for karma to pay me back. Now I had to deal with Mrs. Fake Diamond.
Another thing about the jewelry industry is that the customer always assumes to know more than the jeweler. It's the same situation as the patient telling the doctor how to do his or her medical profession. I'm saying you should always listen more to the professional though the client's opinions and concerns should never be disregarded. Still, jewelry stores are one place where the customer is always delusional.
The problem with Mrs. Fake Diamond was that she had become an intense germophobe. The lady washed her hands at least 15 times every hour. That dries your skin down to cracked leather. To fight the leathery hands she applied cream at least 15 times every hour. At this point I understood she had no idea how physics works.
The soap would get stuck on the bottom of the diamond. It's damn near impossible to just rinse that part of a ring off. Especially when on the hand. Water has a tendency to take a path of least resistance. It sticks slightly more to other things than itself. So the soap underneath was able to cling on and make home like a bum under a bridge.
Then you throw the cream on. There's nowhere for the greasy mess to go. The diamond won't absorb it. Now you have a virtual third world situation underneath the first world setting. The sun wouldn't even be strong enough to make its way around the diamond dragging the inner sparkle out. It stops where soap starts peeing for lack of a bathroom. Or maybe where the cream asks for some change in a dirty paper cup. It high tails it out of there and lets the slums be.
The customer hears all about how soap, cream, hairspray, you name it, it isn't good for a diamond. It's not a piece of bread you can explore different spreads upon. There is no jam for a diamond. Butter will do worse than give a diamond a heart attack. You want to protect your ring, take it off for certain activities. Diamonds are not indestructable, but that's for another story.
A few minutes in the back with an ultrasonic bath and a steam rinse and the diamond is Jesus raised from the tomb. I'm not trying to blaspheme here. It's just this woman's whole life found a new meaning. No longer had her idiot husband been sold a fake diamond that slipped out of its sparkle. She had simply made a forgivable mistake. The diamond's heart attack was only heartburn. Take some Tums, call if it gets worse.
