Polishing off the patina on brass is somewhat controversial—a patina can look unpleasantly grody, but sometimes the buildup is desirable on older pieces. I’ll usually leave the patina on for antique brass pieces (like this hamsa bird finial) and go in with a good scrub for more modern figurines and statues. Personally, I love that glistening shine on brass after a good polish!
So how can you clean vintage and antique brass that you find at a thrift store? My first line of defense against tarnished brass is plain dish soap and water, with maybe a touch of baking soda. Not everything needs to be an elaborate science experiment—you’d be surprised at how much you can get out with just the basics. Even as someone who’s fairly frugal, I’m wary of DIY methods for cleaning brass since you can end up wasting perfectly good ingredients on an involved recipe that doesn’t work.
You’ll find a bevy of guides out there that experiment with ketchup, lemon, or vinegar—I don’t mess around with these methods, since well-formulated brass cleaners are usually under $5 everywhere, from hardware stores to estate sales. And sometimes, you may end up damaging or discoloring your brass piece if you leave acidic DIY cleaners on it for too long. But if it works for you, it works for you!
Anyway, here are my favorite go-to products for cleaning brass.
For a deep clean: Bon Ami (or Bar Keeper’s Friend)
For a deep clean, you really only need a cloth and lightly abrasive cleaner like Bon Ami or Barkeeper’s Friend. Some people prefer Bon Ami because it has fewer, gentler ingredients, but I find that Bar Keeper’s Friend can work in a pinch. You probably have one or the other in your home for tackling tough buildup on pots, bathroom fixtures, etc.
All you have to do is wet your piece, sprinkle your powder of choice onto it, then scrub away with some elbow grease. It might take a while to rinse off the powder, since the residue can sometimes sneak into nooks and crannies. I prefer using a microfiber or cotton rag cloth over a toothbrush or hard brush to avoid scratching the brass surface.
Bear in mind that the patina will form again with time. I polished this brass rocking horse six months ago and you can start to see the tarnish slowly coming back!
For a quick, light polish: Brasso
Open up a bottle of Brasso cream, and you’ll quickly realize how much it stinks. And for an extra pungent chemical, it’s not really something that works wonders for heavy-duty cleaning jobs. But I will give credit where credit is due: Brasso is excellent for cleaning small hardware bits and giving a light polish.
Since Brasso is a cream, it doesn’t leave behind a gritty residue, which makes it great for tackling verdigris on vintage purse hardware and dull etched brass—all you have to do is squeeze a tiny dollop onto a Q-tip. I used it to quickly clean up this brass ram animal figure.
Brasso is also great if you just want a light polish for a relatively clean brass piece. I sometimes find myself too lazy to go through the whole process of heavy scrubbing and rinsing, so it’s nice to simply buff the Brasso onto the surface. With Brasso, all you have to do is leave the cream on for a few minutes, then polish away. No mess, although you’ll see the buildup on your rag.
For scratches and dinged-up brass: Wet sanding with water and sandpaper
A few months ago, I picked up a bunch of dinged-up bird brass pieces at an estate sale. I thought that I had all but flushed $30 or so down the toilet, and so wet sanding became something of a last-ditch effort. And boy oh boy, it was a Hail Mary that WORKED.
This method works best for solid brass with deep scratches. First, you’ll want to cover your piece in soapy water. Reach for a rougher grit sandpaper, like 300 or 400 grit, and cut out a small square. Then, maneuver the sandpaper square up and down perpendicularly to your scratches to buff them out, wetting your sandpaper as needed. You want to move as evenly as possible for a flawlessly smooth finish.
Repeat the process by gradually using finer grit sizes until you reach a 1000 or 1100 grit. Some people go over the sanded piece with a metal polisher after this step, but I simply reach for Brasso for a final touch.
A note of caution: You don’t want to use sandpaper on brass-plated pieces. If you have solid brass, that’s totally fine. But you can do some damage on a plated piece.
As someone who sells a lot of vintage brass, these are a few household products I try to keep in stock for breathing life back into grody pieces. I use these to clean everything from vintage brass candlestick holders to brass lamps — you can’t go wrong with them.
Anyway, thank you for reading and getting to this point of the blog. Be sure to check out my Etsy page to shop brass pieces, and consider saving my blog page for more tips on taking care of vintage items!
