How I Learned to Love Clip on Earrings: A Jewelry Expert’s Guide

Someday I will have the surgery. Not the earlobe one Kris Jenner talked about on television where they made hers prettier, the other one. After several decades of wearing large yellow gold earrings, the ear piercings I got at Unique Jewelers of Brooklyn when I turned thirteen have been stretched to the point of no return. It sounds like a straightforward enough procedure: “I do this every so often,” Dr. Macrene Alexiades tells me. I excise the enlarged hole, sew it shut then pierce again. The stitches stay in for 1 week then I take them out and lay down a steristrip. In an ideal world I wait to re-pierce about 6 weeks. However, if they are in a rush I can repierce a couple mm away from the surgical wound a week after suture removal.” I can manage that, and I trust Dr. Macrene completely. Still, I haven’t done it yet, and for the last few years I have been clip on earring only.

“Of all people how do YOU not have pierced ears?!!” is the general reaction to any request I’ve ever made for clip ons. I explain my predicament, and then my procrastination, and both are generally met with the suggestion to just go and fix my piercings already. I promise, it's happening, but see this period as a silver lining, an opportunity to learn more about the wonderful world of the clip on earring. It is, compared to pierced ears, a relatively new practice, introduced in the very early 20th century (piercings by contrast go back at least 5,000 years). Somehow, during the 19th century piercings got labeled as uncouth and so anyone who wanted to adorn themselves had to find another way. And so they did! Images of women in the Golden Age of Hollywood, removing a clip earring to pick up a phone receiver gave visibility and a kind of glamour to the style but by the late 60’s they seemed tinged with nostalgia.

The clip came back this year care of a return to ladylike dressing and Ryan Murphy’s ode to Capote’s Swans. I wear a pair every day, alternating between Belperron gold, a Sidney Garber two toned square style, and a large Lalaounis drop earring. And though yes, a whole world of earrings has been cut off from me until I get that surgery, the clip on universe is vast. Houses like Verdura and David Webb have an especially wide selection, as does Saint Laurent. Even if I do get that surgery someday, I’m not giving up my clip-ons, I love the way they make me feel like Alexis Carrington, right before she is about to take over Carrington Oil.

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