Hi I have a pastry lifter made in Germany which I believe the lifter part is made from Vermeil and would like to know how to clean it (or I just don’t clean it) Also if you can give me any info on the pastry lifter that would be great also
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Very informative article. Although at the point it talks about cleaning, it suggest re-plating would not be necessary in the event of vermeil loss having spent a previous paragraph telling us about the different between vermeil, gold plating and gold filing.
Collectors of silver gilt are most concerned about the difference between gold plating — an electroplate application of a gold coat on a sterling or sometimes bronze base and the older method it replaced called “mercury loss”.
The old method produced two things; a beautiful long-lasting light lemon-yellow gold on the surface of the silver and a lot of dead silversmiths from inhaling the lost or vaporized mercury. A documented loss is of Charles Hougham. But I suspect there are hundreds more.
Back then they thought mercury was actually beneficial rather than poisonous in fact they used it to treat venereal disease I guess they were right; it killed off the disease. Unfortunately the patient first. Winston Churchill’s father was so treated and died insane.
The cut off date between mercury loss gilding and electro-plate gilding is about 1820.
Look at enough of it and the lemon yellow of the old system and the darker egg yolk-ish colour of the electroplate method become apparent to the naked eye.
This article says the old system was banned by statute. I cannot find that legislation. If anybody knows it, could they post the link?
You can, with proper equipment, use the mercury-loss method in North America to re-coat older items whose value would actually be adversely impacted by a re-gild using electro-plate. Just don’t breathe the mercury fumes.
CRWW
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I realize I have provided you with an answer to a question you didn’t ask and failed to answer the much more simple question you did ask, which was how to clean vermeil?
Both the cited articles say be gentle with it, keep it away from dish soap etc.
In fact vermeil is supposed by statute to be 2.5 microns of plate on silver. In Germany it has to be 800 silver or better and in North America or the UK .925 or better.
The purpose of the coating is to protect the silver under it from reacting to all the things plain silver does react to. It’s found, for instance on egg spoons which otherwise blacken from the sulphuric content of eggs.
So apart from being a precious metal of 10ct. of higher — again a statutory rather than chemical requirement — vermeil is also a protective coating and its single greatest enemy is abrasion.
Gold is non-reactive to oxygen and a lot of the chemicals we put into the atmosphere. Which made coating silver that did react with vermeil very popular when our forebears were competing with each other to see how many pollutants they could pump into the air and still have it sustain human life.
It does react to halogen gases](Google Search) (fluorine, chlorine, bromine), cyanide solutions in the presence of air, and aqua regia, a mixture of nitric and hydrochloric acid according to wikipedia so avoid using an of those to clean it.
The problem with vermeil, and for that matter gold-plating and even gold-filing, which is usually reserved for watches, is not the coating itself but the sub-metal, silver or otherwise which may react adversely to either a chemical or physical stimulus and break through the protective layer.
At that point your problem is not cleaning or preserving the vermeil coating but whether to restore the debilitated coating.
In this case of your cake lifter-- I have this mental image of a cake floating somewhere above our heads like a giant balloon I would probably use soap and water to get dirt off if it is a highly decorated item deploying a small brush to get into the cracks. I generally soak it for a half hour in the warm soapy water and then start brushing.
If that doesn’t work, or if the vermeil is unstable, I have a friend who has one of those ultra-sonic cleaners which use sound and water to deal with stubborn dirt .You can buyer them at Walmart or on Amazon too.
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