Tarnish is silver sulfide. When you polish off tarnish, you remove silver. Maybe only on a microscopic level for each polish, but even that will eventually wear through.bisontuba wrote:Hagerty Silversmiths Polish Spray, 8 Oz....spray it on, let it sit, rub away the tarnish, use a garden hose to clean off, and dry...
The hot water/washing soda (not baking soda)/aluminum foil method creates a catalyst that causes the tarnish to break its chemical bonds, the sulphur ions to realign with the washing soda, and the freed silver ions to bond back to the rest of the silver plate to the horn in much the same way it was plated in the first place. This conserves the silver, so if any residual polishing is necessary, only a minimal amount of silver is removed rather than risking wearing through the plate with other polishing methods, which work great for solid sterling, but not silver plate.