Sometimes we find beautiful things, and they degrade. How can we stop that?

[DeepseekerADS]

There's a couple of my finds which I really did love, junk jewelry in these cases. My question is, how can we save them?

Last year dirt digging I found a very beautiful piece of a junk pendant:



That was a picture from when I first dug it out of the dirt. Since then, the two sections from left bottom to top of "paint" have fallen off. That took a beautiful find to less than what it was.

Is there anything I should have coated this with prior to it drying out and dropping off? What would have been a permanent fix for it before this happened?

Today was this:



Got this out of the water today, complete with no "jewels" lost. It was wet, and 6 hours later one of the stones has come "unglued" and now missing probably in my finds pocket.

Is there anything I could have done to this as soon out of the water as I could, to have kept this beauty from spitting out parts of it?

By the way, Steve said that was a belly button piercing jewelry.

What can we do with them before they're not beautiful anymore?

 

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[hvacker]

Gold's value is partly because it stays pretty. Any jewelry stored short of a box will do like we do and slowly fall
apart. The law of Entropy states along with others that everything goes from a state of order to one of disorder.
Not a theory but a law. Now along with that what you see as order and what nature sees are probably very different.

Jewelry is fragile but a properly set stone should not normally fall out. They might have just been glued and were destined to fall out anyway. Maybe rhinestones.
If your really interested in a piece and feel it has value I'd think the best place to take it would be a conservator. There are
conservators for almost anything.

 

[FriscoT06]

Clear nail polish, or 50/50 elmer's glue and water

 

[FriscoT06]

Both are cheap and reversible. The elmer's glue one likely won't affect paint or glued items as much as the nail polish.