Earrings act as a new precious makeup

Fine jewellery and piercing don’t have anything to do with tattooing,” says Tash. “Over the years the jewellery has improved for other piercings that aren’t in the frontal lobe. It’s not about having lots of them, but beautiful things in unexpected places.” She adds that the British and Parisian are much more receptive to multiple piercings and that she is currently working on opening permanent outposts across the world, as well as developing the wholesale business for jewellery which sells through luxury sites such as Net-a-Porter and MatchesFashion.com (prices generally hover between $150 and $500, with the exception of a few more diamond-laden designs). “It sells on its own merit, but it helps to have jewellery stylists who know how to fit particular pieces to different parts of the ear.”

Completedworks's sculptural "Flui

Anna Jewsbury, who started Completedworks in 2013 with her brother Mark, has a rapidly growing business due to her sculptural silver earrings — silver because it is lighter than gold, and therefore can used for larger-scale and more complex designs. “Earrings are the most popular and it’s mainly single earrings,” she says of her jewellery, which begins by rolling clay into larger sculptures and is then scaled down. In the last year along, her business has grown by 100 percent, 60 percent of which is contributed by earrings ($370 to $1,520 for the most part; $11,400 to $15,200 for marble, gold and diamond pieces). “Bridal rings have the most value, but you don’t need a ring size to buy earrings.” The result is that most of her earring customers come through her digital platforms and buy online, which is indicative to the changing attitudes to buying fine jewellery.

Woolton says that even the Place Vendôme’s traditional fine jewellery houses have become more reactive to trends in recent years. “Victoire de Castellane brought a costume jewellery sensibility to fine jewellery and did whatever she wanted with it,” she says of Christian Dior’s long-serving creative director of fine jewellery. “Recently at Cannes, there were so many statement earrings, long shoulder dusting earrings, especially from Chopard.”

In May at the Sotheby’s “Magnificent Jewels and Noble Jewels” sale in Geneva, Switzerland, a pair of contrasting coloured diamond earrings (a blue one at 14.54 carats and a pink one at 16.00 carats) fetched a record $42.1 million and $15.3 million respectively, and were bought by the same buyer for a record $57.4 million. “Sometimes they put the stones in a setting just for the mounting,” notes Woolton. “Or often they’ll be sold separately, but they sold these together to the same buyer and I like to think that it’s because they’d like to wear them. $57 million for a pair of statement earrings!