How to shine your silver without silver polish

I'm not a huge jewelry person. Most of the jewelry I own was gifted to me. I'm a pretty low maintenance person in general, so I don't really think about what kind of jewelry I should wear too often. If I wear jewelry, I'll usually keep wearing the same piece for a while. Since it's summer, I have toe rings that I'll wear most days (usually don't take them off unless I have to put on shoes that render wearing toe rings uncomfortable, including my rock climbing shoes). I have a couple of rings that I'll wear consistently too, although recently I haven't been wearing them as much because I'll take them off to go rock climbing (I don't like the way my skin gets pinched by the rings) and forget to put them back on. I also own a few nice earrings given to me by friends and my mom (although I tend to lose one pretty easily), but if I do wear earrings, I'll usually wear cheap ones I get at Forever21/St. Mark's/H&M because then if I lose them, I don't feel so bad.

Anyway, one piece of jewelry that I have on almost all the time is my Tiffany's Elsa Peretti cross. Two of my friends gave it to me for my 16th birthday, and I like it not only for its religious symbolism (I'm Christian) but also because it's a simple, elegant design. I just checked the price -- it's now $150. I'm pretty sure when I received it (over 12 years ago), it was half that price. Oh, inflation and luxury goods companies artificially inflating the price of their goods...

It's silver, so it tarnishes. One thing that stuck with me from my fourth grade teacher, Mr. Black, was the lesson that you can use toothpaste to polish silver. Amazing, right?

OK, maybe not, but if you don't feel like going to the store to buy silver polish, you can just take some toothpaste, smear a lot of it on the silver, rub it around, and rinse it off. I took an old toothbrush and scrubbed at it, which is probably NOT good for the silver, but definitely got the job done quickly. I took the above photo with my iPhone camera, using the ToyCamera app on the High Contrast B/W setting to get the above effect. Now my necklace is nice and shiny!