When I finished sorting beads for the May Earring Club, I found myself in possession of a handful of stones that I couldn’t use because they were either chipped or had internal flaws that put them at much higher than normal-for-fluorite risk of breaking. So I set them aside, and pondered, and eventually they told me they wanted to be an experiment in jewelry that ISN’T meant to be durable. 

So: here they are. A set of five single earrings, all beautiful and all very flawed. They are almost certainly going to break at some point, which you can choose to interpret however you want: maybe they were holding a wish that’s ready to be released into the world, maybe they were protecting you from something, or maybe it was the price of something changing in your life. 

I’d lean towards the later, personally, but I’m a bit biased after what happened to me last fall:

when one of your favorite earrings goes missing

on the day you finally sign the papers that say

the war is over and the house is yours

take it as a sign

you’ve read enough fairytales

to know everything comes at a cost

and if a single opal is the price of freedom

that’s a fair enough trade.

(As usual I defaulted to sterling French hooks, but I also stock titanium and surgical steel french hooks, high-quality silver-plated leverback findings, and two kinds of clip-on earring thingies, and you can upgrade to any of those right over here; for this set, please add two pairs of whatever you need to your cart, and I’ll throw in the fifth.)