Like many others with an Instagram account, I am a fan of putting together a look when the occasion calls for it. Accessories are crucial to dressing up, but when it comes to earrings, I have for years limited myself to simple pearl or cubic-zirconia studs over larger statement earrings for fear of tearing my lobes. That is, until I came across these patches while browsing Amazon. Little adhesives you simply stick behind your ear to ‘protect healthy ear lobes against tearing from the weight of earrings,’ they seemed straightforward enough, and £12 for 60 patches was a small price to pay to try something that promised to let me wear big dangly earrings without turning the tiny holes in my lobes into unsightly slits.
When the box arrived, I opened it up to find six sheets of peel-off oval patches roughly half the size of a 5p coin. The patches are translucent, self-adhesive on one side, and small enough to fit discreetly on the backs of my lobes, where a naked eye would likely never notice them. When you put in an earring, you stick the post through both your earhole and the patch behind it — the patch took a bit of force to puncture at first, but the process quickly became second nature. (I found it helpful to hold my thumb against the back of the patch to feel when the earring post successfully made it through.) Once the post was sticking through the patch, I just popped the back on it as I normally would.
The genius of the patches, which are supposedly made with “super-reinforced” material, is that they — not the holes in my lobes — bore the weight of the earrings and kept them in place. The adhesive clung firmly enough to my skin so the patches didn’t budge, but it wasn’t so strong that the patches were difficult to remove (peeling them off was a breeze). On my first wear, I paired the patches with some chunky drop earrings for a wedding, and the earrings not only stayed in place after hours on the dance floor but felt completely weightless the entire night. The best part: When I took them out, my lobe holes were as tiny as ever. I’ve since put my heaviest chandeliers and biggest hoops to the test — and can happily report I’ve yet to find a pair too heavy for these things to handle.
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