Copper Care & Accessories

Copper care products

Looking after copper comes down to two things: never leaving it wet, and using the right cleaner. This category holds copper polish, soft cloths and storage solutions. Steel wool, oven cleaner and chlorine-based products damage both copper and tin, use none of them.

What you are cleaning is an oxide layer a few molecules thick, not dirt. Every polish works by dissolving or abrading that layer away, which means every polish takes a little metal with it. That is fine occasionally and bad weekly, and it is why we tell customers to dry their pieces rather than to clean them.

Home remedy or ready-made polish?

For light tarnish, lemon with baking soda or vinegar with salt works: the acid dissolves the oxide layer. For deep, older patina a ready-made copper polish is more controlled and will not scratch. Never apply polish to a tin-lined interior, that surface is cleaned with soapy water only.

Test any method on the underside first. Two pieces that look identical can carry quite different finishes, and a polish that brings a bright pan back in one pass will strip a lacquered vase in the same stroke. Lacquered surfaces take soapy water and nothing else; once the lacquer is scratched, the honest fix is to take it all off and start again.

• Light tarnish: half a lemon dipped in salt, rubbed over the surface, then rinsed and dried at once.
• Medium: baking soda and lemon juice worked into a paste, left for two minutes, rinsed off.
• Heavy or uneven: a proprietary copper polish on a soft cloth, a small area at a time.
• Rinse every acid off completely. Residue left on copper starts a fresh stain of its own.
• Wear gloves; skin oils mark a freshly polished surface immediately.

How often?

Kitchen pieces in daily use need no polishing at all; drying them properly is enough. Decorative pieces in a cabinet are polished two or three times a year. Patinated items should be left entirely alone, polish erases the very finish you bought. Pieces going into long storage are wrapped in a dry cloth and kept somewhere without damp.

Anti-tarnish paper or a closed bag slows things down considerably for pieces you only bring out at holidays. Newspaper does the opposite, since the ink and the damp it holds will mark copper within a season.