How to care for solid brass: the complete guide

Solid brass needs very little care. Day to day, a dry cloth. When you want it bright, a little brass polish, buffed off completely. Never anything abrasive. Everything else in this guide is detail on those three sentences.

It applies to brass, bronze and copper alike, and to everything we make — bowls, trays, door furniture and lamps. If you are unsure which metal you have, start with the difference between brass, bronze and copper.

First: is it bare or lacquered?

Almost every question about brass care depends on this.

	Bare (unlacquered)	Lacquered
How it looks over time	Darkens unevenly over months	Stays bright for years, then yellows and peels
Polishing cloth test	Cloth comes away black	Cloth stays clean
Can you polish it?	Yes, as often as you like	No — you will cut through the lacquer
How to clean it	Dry cloth; polish when you want	Damp cloth, then dry

Everything we make is bare. We explain why in why we stopped plating anything — in short, a finish is the part of any metal object that fails first, and bare metal has no finish to fail.

Everyday care

• Wipe with a dry, soft cloth. Microfibre is ideal.
• For sticky marks, a cloth barely damp with warm water and a drop of washing-up liquid, then dry straight away.
• Pieces that hold food — trays, bowls — wash by hand in warm soapy water and dry at once. Never the dishwasher.
• Fingerprints on bare brass show as dark marks within a couple of weeks. They are the first sign of patina, not damage.

Removing tarnish

When you want bare brass bright again:

1. A small amount of mild brass polish on a soft cloth.
2. Work along the surface — with the direction of a brushed finish, not in circles.
3. Buff off every trace with a clean cloth. Polish left in a corner or a recess keeps working and leaves a pale halo.
4. For a hammered surface, a soft brush lifts residue from the hollows.

Home methods work on bare brass: lemon juice and salt, or a paste of white vinegar, salt and flour, applied, left for a few minutes, then rinsed off completely and dried. They are acidic — rinse thoroughly, and do not use them on lacquered pieces or near wiring.

For lamps, which are full of holes and electrical parts, follow how to clean a Moroccan brass lamp instead.

Living with a patina

If you do nothing, bare brass goes through a predictable year: fingerprints in the first weeks, an uneven gold-brown between months two and six, and a stable, deep brown after that — bright where hands touch it, dark in the shadows. The month-by-month version, with the three moments people worry, is in living with a patina.

Both states — bright and dark — are correct. You can move between them whenever you like.

Slowing it down without lacquer

A thin coat of microcrystalline wax, rubbed on and buffed to nothing, slows tarnish for around six months. It is what museums use on bronze. It does not yellow, and white spirit removes it. We wax every piece before it leaves the workshop.

What actually damages brass

The list is short:

• Abrasive pads, wire wool, scouring powder — permanent scratches. The one genuine mistake.
• Dishwashers.
• Standing water, especially salt water, left for days.
• Polish or acid left on the surface.
• Ammonia and bleach-based cleaners.

Heat, cold, sunlight, knocks and years of neglect are all survivable, and mostly invisible in the end. The brass hardware we spent a decade repairing had survived a century of all of them.

Repairs

We repair anything we made, free, for as long as we are at the bench. See our care and repair page, or write to us.