Earrings as art - Get Yours Now
We like to decorate our ears. Try to forget that you got your ears pierced at a mall as soon as you could convince your mother to let you do it. Try to forget that you've given away more earrings than daisies in Cabo. Consider from the perspective of an alien visiting our planet for the first time:
"They decorate their hearing receptors with small pieces of shiny metal and colored rocks."
In our fast-paced modern cultures, our ears provide one of the easiest and most prominent body parts to adorn. We express ourselves, our moods, our attitudes through the jewels that we put in our ears.
Earrings have been around forever. Well, okay, as far as we can tell, really, a long time. The oldest known earrings are the Lunate earrings. The Lunate earrings were excavated from Ur in Mesopotamia, what is now Iraq (of all places). These gold crescent-shaped hoops are approximately 4,500 years old. The earliest earring designs were hoops and pendants made from precious metals, most commonly gold and sometimes bone.
The popularity of earrings rose and fell over the centuries in direct relation to hairstyles. For example, the adornment of our ears fell out of favor during the Middle Ages. It was considered immoral for respectable married women to appear in public with their heads uncovered. Then, in the mid-16th century, women began to wear their hair up, exposing their ears. The earrings resurfaced.
Today, earrings thrive with as many different variations as people wear them. We use pendants of all kinds, rings and posts and spirals and swirls, made from all kinds of materials, including silver and gold and seashells, pearls and gems and glass beads. We wear earrings as art.
By Serene Chong, Eleworth
By Topher ZiCornell, Eleworth
