Jewellery Reunited is a service run by The Guild of Jewellery Designers to help reunite lost or stolen jewellery with its rightful owner

The idea of a service to reunite people with their loved jewellery came about following a month of desperately retracing steps and turning our house upside down while frantically searching every room, twice sometimes three, with no luck. Finally resigned to the despair of losing my engagement, eternity and wedding rings ( I hasten to add, not even a year old, as we tied the knot in April).

However while getting ready for a change of hair colour, imagine my elation (well my husbands elation as he didn’t need to purchase them again), at finding all my rings inside a hair dye box...

There are a lot of myths and legends concerning this topic so I will try to put the record straight.

Titanium is a material that is not particularly hard but is very strong and has a high tensile strength. Many people are unsure as to the difference between hardness and tensile strength and often get them confused. Let us consider diamond, the hardest material currently known to man.

If you had a rod of diamond that was 25mm in diameter and 1 metre long, you wouldn’t easily scratch it or mark it but if you try to bend it over your knee, you would probably find that it would snap like a carrot. Titanium on the other hand is relatively soft in as much as it can be easily cut and marked, but has a high tensile strength which means that if you put it over your knee and had the strength to bend it, it would bend without breaking.

Tensile strength, in a nutshell, is resistance of a material to pulling force before it shears or pulls apart. Paper has low...

There are various different materials used for wedding rings, this article examines each material and its wearability rate.

1. Silver – A relatively inexpensive semi-precious white metal, reasonably soft and ductile and popular with men both as a fashion item and less so as a wedding ring. It does not resist scratching well and has a tendency to wear thin in time.

Another feature of silver is its reactivity with the acid in human sweat which tends to turn it black, although this tarnishing effect is easily removed.

2. Gold. 9 carat gold – fast becoming out of vogue with consumers in the UK in favour of 18 carat gold due to its low content of pure gold (37.5%). The low gold content also accounts for its paler yellow colour and in the case of 9 carat white gold, its whiter colour is due to the addition of silver or other whitening materials.

As with silver, 9 carat gold is prone to tarnishing but is arguably harder and more durable...