When I got my ears pierced at seven years old, my mom literally made me sign a contract stating I would not wear dangly earrings until I was 18. Not the best strategy on mom’s part: Tell a kid like me what not to do, and that’s all she’ll want to do. And it was at that very moment my lifelong obsession with oversize earrings was born.
Now that I’m a grown woman—and the accessories director at Glamour—my collection of earrings is vast and it answers to no one, mothers included. And while I regularly rotate between statement earrings of all shapes, classic hoops in every size and every color make up a large part of my collection. At least I thought I had every color until Alison Chemla, the designer behind the delightfully witty fine jewelry line Alison Lou launched Loucite, a 12-piece collection of hoops blending colored enamel with jelly-like Lucite.
It’s that jelly look that really got me—they look so smooth, like a picture you’d find of the @satisfactionclip Instagram page, a harbinger of all tactile textures you just want to touch.
“It’s something I have been working on for the past year—it took time to find the right shape,” Chemla says, adding that she designed the Lucite and enamel to create a triangle, which allows both textures to play off each other, whether you’re wearing the small one-inch hoops ($125) or the largest three-inch size ($165.).
As for the designer’s preference? “I love the cherry red, a signature Alison Lou color,” she said “I think people will be surprised how wearable a three-inch hoop can be.”
I couldn’t agree more. Sorry, mom.
Shop a few of my favorite pairs, below, and head to Alison Lou to shop them all now.