10 Bizarre Jewelry Items

Copyright 2016 by Gary L. Pullman

Jewelry has been around for thousands of years, long enough for just about every material on the planet—and some out of this world—to be used to make every imaginable type of body adornment. Or so one might suppose. However, imaginative designers have found some original substances or have used old ones in novel ways. The result is the creation of something original—and something, sometimes, that's downright shocking.

Makers of jewelry have used mineral, plant, animal, and, yes, even human materials to create earrings, necklaces, bracelets, pins, brooches, and other jewelry items. The possibilities seem endless, and some of them, as this list shows, are truly bizarre.

10 Roadkill

Kristin Bunyard of Austin, Texas, designs jewelry from animal bones. Most of her materials are supplied by roadkill. One item, a choker, was made of “rattlesnake vertebrae,” a skull “dangling in the middle.” She has also used “mixed media,” combining the bones of mice and snakes or “pearls” and an “armadillo tail.” After picking the bones out of the carcasses, Bunyard boils them before cleaning them with peroxide. She spends up to 30 hours on necklaces to ensure she cleans each bone “thoroughly” so there's no “lingering” odor. She's also made rosaries from rooster skulls and a “crown” from the backbone of a dog.

9 Recycled Barbie Parts

Eyes. Noses. Mouths. Hands. Arms. Breasts. These and other parts of Barbie are the materials artist Margaux Lange uses to create her necklaces, earrings, pins, and other jewelry items, securing the body parts in place using “hand-fabricated sterling silver and pigmented resins.” One of her pieces, the Barbie Heart Pendant, mounts five pairs of the doll's plastic breasts inside a wheel of heart-shaped frames fixed to a flower-like pentagram. If The Shoe Fits bracelet is a loop composed of many pairs of Barbie's silver high heels. Lange's line of recycled Barbie parts also includes a Winged Neckpiece made of the doll's arms; a Hands Bracelet; the Smiley Necklace on Torque, made of 29 smiling Barbie mouths; and earrings studded with Barbie ears.

8 Dead Relatives

Papua New Guinea's Angu people adorn some of their jewelry with objects which art dealer Ron Perry mistook for “tufted balls of fur.” When he asked a warrior what the decorations were, he discovered the “balls of fur” were, in reality, opossum testicles. Odd, yes, but the Angu's jewelry is made from even stranger stuff, such as necklaces strung with human fingers provided by “deceased relatives.” Their “smoked remains” are worn as adornments as a way of memorializing them, which explains the necklace made of the sternum of a man's late wife, the belts of “human leg bones,” and a necklace that included “the complete smoked hand of a baby.”

7 Human and Animal Bones

It appears Neanderthals were more aesthetic than anyone thought. They were also “more cognitively advanced,” Kansas University's professor emeritus of anthropology, David Frayer, said. The jewelry they created, mostly of human and animal bones, shows “a level of technical sophistication,” he added. Cut marks on the bones indicate they were fashioned together as items of jewelry. One piece, possibly a necklace, was made of eagle talons and a foot bone, or phalanx, and may have had religious significance.

6 Human Hair

Until 1925, hair jewelry was popular. Victorians, who also appreciated such of the finer things in life as “fans made out of preserved birds,” were especially fond of “hair work.” Men and women alike wore jewelry that incorporated snips of human hair. Men might wear items created using their wives' hair. Women might collect jewelry featuring the locks of their friends' hair. Rings, brooches, necklaces, “hair jewelry,” and other items were fashioned of such tresses, often as memorial pieces. Although hair jewelry is out of fashion now, “small organizations” remain “dedicated to preserving the craft of hairwork.” Who knows? It could become all the rage again someday.

5 Human Breast Milk

Lactating ladies who want to preserve a sample of their breast milk for posterity can do just that, thanks to Anne Marie Sharoupim, who started Mamma’s Liquid Love to make jewelry from women's mammary gland secretions. To show her appreciation for the breast milk a woman donated to her, Sharoupim made her a pendant from the woman's milk. The woman was so grateful and overjoyed, she said, to receive the pendant that Sharoupim decided to start a company dedicated to making such jewelry for all lactating ladies. The pendants are fitted with “a pearly white stone” that's really “breast milk preserved in resin.”

4 Human Blood

When she was married to Billy Bob Thornton, Angelina Jolie decided blood was thicker than separation. She and Thornton, both actors, were apart much of the time, making movies, Thornton explained in a speech to Loyola Marymount University's School of Film & Television students. Jolie bought twin “clear” lockets. She suggested it would be “romantic” for them to slice their fingertips with a razor blade and smear “a little blood” inside the lockets to “wear . . . around” their necks. That's all it amounted to, he insisted, but people blew the incident out of proportion until it sounded as if he and Jolie were “were wearing quart jars of blood around” their “necks and were “vampires” living “in a dungeon.”

3 Laurel Leaves

According to one of the half a million scraps of 1,900-year-old Egyptian papyrus known, collectively, as the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, which are housed in the Sackler Library at Oxford University, laurel leaves were woven or otherwise fashioned into jewelry, because “wearing a necklace made from the leaves of a shrub called Alexandrian laurel, also known as Poet’s laurel,” was believed to cure hangovers.

2 Meteorites

A bead, dating from between 3,350 B. C. and 3,600 B. C., and discovered “at an Egyptian burial site,” was made from an iron meteorite. For thousands of years, meteorites have been used to make ancient jewelry and other artifacts, partly because ancient and medieval people believed such stones promoted healing: in particular, “iron meteorites” brought “balance and strength,” and “the nickel in” them purified “the wearer’s blood.” Today, silvery “cross-sectional” fragments of the metal are “mounted in a bezel setting” and used in watches, necklaces, bracelets, and rings.

1 Dinosaur Fossils

Boutique owner Gina Johnson Morris thought there must be better uses for the fossilizedbones of dinosaurs than to be stored in the basement of Montana's Makoshika Dinosaur Museum, even if the specimens weren't in good enough condition for educational or display purposes, so she teamed up with the museum. Now, the museum provides her with the material to make her dinosaur jewelry, and they split the profits. Morris has turned a fragment of Triceratops into a pendant, fashioned Hadrosaur vertabrae into earrings, and transformed bits of Hadrosaur eggshells into necklaces. Each of her pieces, she says, is a “65-million-year-old heirloom.” She also transforms fragments of teeth, tusks, tortoise shells, and tails into jewelry, according to how best to “display the fossils' features.”