Thursday, February 5, 2015

I Need to Ask My Jeweler AND my Rheumatologist About This One

My skin is just so weird. It really is. I would imagine that my SCL (subacute cutaneous lupus) is largely to blame, and Sjogren's can cause skin issues too, but this latest thing is just bizarre.

Over the past few months, I noticed that the skin on my ring finger gets a strange grey coating under my wedding ring. I can wash it off, and when I do my skin looks perfectly normal with no rash or redness. So I put my ring back on and within an hour or so this dumb stupid stuff is back.

Good grief.

The first thing I did was to thoroughly clean my ring, thinking that maybe there was some gunk stuck in the underside crevices. So I dug around there thoroughly with a soapy toothpick and scrubbed like mad. It made my ring all sparkly and pretty, but -- within a few hours of putting it back on, that ugly grey stuff was back.

If this thing were made of anything but 14 karat gold, I'd be suspicious that there was some kind of metal/skin reaction going on here. I don't tolerate wearing nickel jewelry. But gold? I've been wearing this ring for twenty years now and this has never happened before.


I scrubbed every nook and cranny of that ring. Cleanest it's been for years. But the grey skin film still comes back after it's been on my finger for awhile.

I Googled this phenomena, and it appears that this does happen to lots of people, mostly women, but no one seems to have an answer.

Does this happen to you?

3 comments:

jloblow said...

I wash my rings in ammonia , then rinse in baking soda
Other wise I get a black coating especially the silver

Anonymous said...

I've read that several things can cause this:

excessive acidity in your body, hormones out of balance, and low iron.

You may want to get those levels checked the next time you see your doctor (if you haven't recently)

BeckyJo

Kelly said...

Yes, this has happened to me off and on over the past 30 years, but not since the advent of Google so I never Googled it. I never have figured out exactly what caused it, but I did notice back in my 30's when it was happening more there were certain restaurants that caused it to happen every time I ate there, no matter what I ordered.

Bodies are a complete mystery sometimes.

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