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
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.”
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