Whoops! What to Do When You’ve Broken a Piece of Your China

We’ve all been there—you’re washing a dish off in the sink and it slips from your hands, banging into the sink and getting chipped. Just about the only thing worse than chipping or cracking a dish is altogether breaking it. Yet things get knocked off of the counter or tossed around during a move, and breakage happens. It can be unavoidable at times. If it’s an inexpensive plate you use for everyday dining, it might not cause much of a panic. When it’s your valuable fine china, however, it can seem disastrous.

Fortunately, there are steps you can take to cut down on the cost and hassle of replacing a chipped or broken dish. Lenox china has two different programs in place to help out with breakage replacement. The minute you purchase or receive a set of china from Lenox, you should go online to register all of the items in your set with their Lifetime Breakage Replacement Program. Registration is simple and straightforward; you just use Lenox’s search engine to select all of your pieces, list the number of each piece you have, and enter your contact information. With this program behind you, breaking a dish will no longer seem like such an ordeal. You can just email or call Lenox (their contact information is on the website) to notify them of the broken item. They will then replace the piece that has broken, as long as it’s in stock, at a rate of fifty-percent off of the current suggested retail price. You’ll still have to pay tax, shipping, and handling, but the half off rate greatly reduces your overall replacement expenditure. If you’ve selected particularly pricey china from Lenox and broken one of your bigger pieces, you’ll really notice the difference.

Lenox's Blue Frost fine china looks beautiful now, but what would you do if you broke one of the dishes?

Should you happen to own Simply Fine Lenox® products, you can also take advantage of the Simply Fine China Dinnerware Limited Warranty that Lenox offers. This program makes sure that you’re not just covered for the big breakages, but also for the little things, like chipping the foot, rim, handle, or other edge surfaces of your pieces. This is important to have, because normal daily usage like washing, serving, or even stacking for storage, can easily lead to accidental chipping. With this limited warranty in place, Lenox will send you a dinnerware replacement product or a similarly functional item in a different shape or pattern (should they not have your exact product in stock) if something gets chipped. Though the Simply Fine China Dinnerware Limited Warranty only covers edge surface chips, as opposed to cracks, scratches, or non-edge surface chips, it’s still very helpful. Combined with the Lifetime Breakage Replacement Program’s full breakage coverage, it allows you to feel better about both the big breaks and the little edge chips.

This Lenox Simply Fine Chirp China would be covered under both the Breakage and Limited Warranty policies.

Of course, sometimes a break happens that’s fairly clean, which means you can probably repair the dish without having to fully replace it. If only one or two chunks of a plate break off, you may be able to glue it back together yourself. Don’t reach for superglue, which will dry too quickly for you to make the necessary adjustments to get the right fit. Instead, try using clear bond epoxy. It’s waterproof, very strong, and will do a great job of filling in any tiny gaps between the broken piece(s) and the rest of the dish. To begin, clean the dish and the broken piece(s) very well and then thoroughly dry them off. Any leftover moisture could affect the glue. Double check to make sure everything fits together tightly, then apply a thin, light coat of epoxy along one side of the break using a toothpick or matchstick. Join the pieces together, clamp them into place (masking tape or even hot wax poured over the broken area and allowed to harden will work for clamping), and set the dish aside to dry.

If you’re not comfortable repairing the piece yourself, or if it’s a pricy or heirloom piece of china, you may want to take the dish and broken pieces to a professional for permanent repair. Hopefully, however, you can avoid all of these repair and replacement options by treating your china right. Clean it properly and carefully, store it well, and—particularly if it’s fine china—use it for special occasions only. Oh, and it’s probably wise to keep fine china at the grown-ups’ table on holidays. The kids won’t know any better if you give them something a little less breakable than china, and you’ll thank yourself later for avoiding potential breakage disasters.