In the mid-1990s, getting my ears pierced felt like a sizable check on my to-do list as a 14-year-old. But now there are 9-year-olds in my son’s class with more ear piercings than the five I have.
No longer on the margins of the beauty industry, many piercing studios operate like luxury boutiques or salons, complete with smoothies and lengthy style consultations, where customers can have their heavily stacked lobes, conch, daith and helix piercings carefully curated. And their jewelry — often clusters of dainty studs, huggies, hoops, chains and drop styles in precious materials like diamond and gold — evoke elegance, not rebellion.
A vast and evolving terminology is used to map the ear: For starters, there is the conch, the shell-like middle portion of the ear’s cartilage; the helix, the upper part of the cartilage; the flat, the fold of the upper ear; the tragus, the inner cartilage; the daith, the inner cartilage fold; and the rook, just above the daith.
“I rarely do a single piercing,” said Svetlana Hristova, the head piercer at the jeweler and piercing specialist Lark & Berry. Its stores in London and Houston offer what the brand calls “ear stories,” multiple ear piercings on a single ear performed according to a pre-designed plan during a single visit.
“I now get requests for a first-ever piercing not on the lobe, but straight on the cartilage,” Ms. Hristova said. “I think that’s spectacular.”
Ear piercings have become an affordable luxury, said Emily Gordon-Smith, the content director at the trend forecaster Stylus. The cost of the piercing is often free or a nominal amount with the purchase of jewelry. “It’s a way to switch up your aesthetic, especially when we’re all spending less on clothing,” Ms. Gordon-Smith said.
While the so-called “Zoom boom” of the pandemic sparked the appetite for face framing ear jewelry, celebrities including Kylie Jenner, Rihanna, Harry Styles, Michael B. Jordan, Lewis Hamilton and even Jeff Goldblum have “cemented the broader consumer interest in the piercing category,” she added.
Right now there is a revival in the goth aesthetic, Ms. Gordon-Smith said, moving mainstream tastes away from minimal stacks and toward heavy-metal looks such as barbells that connect one cartilage piercing to another. Notably the style was seen during Paris Fashion Week at Alessandro Michele’s spring 2025 show for Valentino, where models showed (faux) industrial-style septum and lip jewelry, as well as in new offerings from brands such as Cough In Vain, Hannah Martin and Collina Strada.
Marking Milestones
While the wide acceptance and multiplicity of ear piercing possibilities might be applauded, the jewelry designer Maria Black worries that something has been lost along the way. Her brand, which she established in 2010 in Copenhagen, started its piercing service for clients in 2017, and now has piercing studios in Selfridges in London, as well as in boutiques in Denmark, Germany and Norway.
“The excitement of piercing is dying down,” she said. “It can all feel a bit copy and paste.” She said she saw two piercing worlds: Industry pioneers who saw piercing as a form of body modification, which was about “community and expressing a different self than the ‘norm’,” and those who saw piercing as self expression and adornment, “the same as lash extensions or getting your hair dyed.”
Lisa Bubbers, the co-founder of the piercing business Studs, agreed that piercing “is related to trends and adornment, like changing your hairstyle, nails, or buying a new outfit.” But, said Ms. Bubbers, whose business has 30 piercing locations in the United States, “what’s unique about piercings is that they are always about personal milestones.”
The jewelry designer Lucas Bauer’s first pierced ear came courtesy of his mother, armed with a needle, ice, cork and an earring that she had brought back to their Paris home from a trip to India. “For me it was never really about a political gesture or a rebellion against my family because my mum always had piercings,” he said.
But ear piercings always communicate something significant, Mr. Bauer said. “It’s a kind of language — whether it’s ceremonial, or the semiotics of the right hoop that was used by the L.G.B.T.Q.+ community,” he noted. “Personally, it’s always a significant moment that makes me want to get another ear piercing.”
The moment could be a breakup, or simply moving to a new city, he said: “There’s something about the sensation, it’s about marking my body in order to reconnect back to myself and somehow making yourself feel alive through the pain.”
Mr. Bauer’s perspective has links to the millennia-old practice of ear piercing. Among the peoples of Mesoamerica, it was a rite of passage; in ancient Egypt, it was thought to have functioned as a status symbol and a means of warding off demon spirits. And in some branches of Hinduism, Karnavedha is an ear piercing ceremony typically performed before a child turns 5 years old.
Gravity Defying
“I find it fascinating that this small metal post has the potential to make a powerful statement,” said Ben Perdue, the founder of Stud London, which specializes in vintage stud earrings. “It can tell you a lot, whether it’s through the details, scale, material, colors or through a symbol. Or through creating interesting juxtapositions — like fine jewelry next to a luminescent rave piercing.”
And the creative designing possibilities for ear piercings are endless, said Mr. Bauer, who previously designed jewelry and accessories at Louis Vuitton. This is borne out in the earrings he designs, such as the Aclathra, which was designed for a single piercing in the right ear but has tendrils that weave around it, giving the illusion of multiple piercings. “I want to create these metal beings that crawl around the ear and coexist with the body,” he said.
As for Ms. Black, she said she was renewing her focus on the design process and craftsmanship in the coming year. “As multiple ear piercings have become more common, it’s too easy to get caught up in data and performance analytics when it comes to the trends,” she said. “My favorite earring designs are when you feel like you need a master’s degree to figure out how the design works.”
But perhaps the biggest statement these days is not getting your ears pierced at all. “I know a lot of the young generation who don’t want it because it reminds them of their parents,” said Mr. Bauer, adding that his nephew, 17, and niece, 14, are among this group. “It’s like smoking a cigarette,” he said. “They don’t understand it.”
And next year he plans to reverse the conventional design process. Instead of creating something to be worn in a pre-existing pierced hole, the idea, he said, is to “find a stone from dormant stock, design an earring using the stone and then work out where the piercing should go — that would be the ultimate in personalization.”
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