Blog/Learn About Body Jewelry/What You Need To Know About Ear Weights
Published Thursday, March 9, 2023
What Are Ear Weights?
Ear weights are a type of jewelry that can be used on healed stretched lobes. They hook through your lobe and dangle down. Just as the name suggests, ear weights are heavier than your average dangling earring. Weights can be worn on a naked lobe or through eyelets and earskins, and come in a wide variety of unique styles! These styles can include hoops, clicker weights, shield and spade weights, keyhole weights, and coils. They also come in a variety of materials, everything from brass and steel, handmade glass, and organic materials like stone and wood.
SHOP OUR EAR WEIGHTS COLLECTION HERE
What’s The Difference Between Ear Weights and Ear Hangers?
Ear weights are a type of hanging design. While all hangers dangle from stretched ears, ear weights typically are heavy enough to pull down and alter the shape of your lobes. Ear weights are often worn through lobes stretched to a larger size than the gauge of the jewelry, leaving a gap between the top of the piercing and the jewelry. Lighter hangers are more likely to be worn with the gauge of the jewelry matching the size of your lobes, resembling larger versions of the dangle earrings worn in standard ear piercings. Below you can see the difference between ear weights and ear hangers.
Ear Weights:
Ear Hangers:
Can You Stretch Your Ears Using Ear Weights?
You should not use ear weights to stretch your lobes. Weights are largely decorative pieces, and while historically people have used them to stretch, they are not recommended as a means of stretching today. They’re simply jewelry pieces meant to adorn your ears for short periods of time. Using weights as stretching tools can cause your lobes to only stretch at the bottom, making the bottom of your ear lobe thinner and prone to tearing. Remember that when you’re stretching you want the entire diameter of your lobe to stretch evenly and using ear weights doesn’t allow that. If you are trying to stretch, we have stretching kits on our site to help you do that.
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How Do You Wear Ear Weights?
If you're brand new to wearing weights, start with something lighter and slowly move up to heavier ones as your ears adjust. Just like stretching, you can’t just jump into heavy ear weights or you risk damaging your lobes. Let your lobes rest for a couple of days before you wear weights again. Once your lobes have rested, try wearing your weights again for a slightly longer period of time and repeat the process until you can wear weights for up to eight to 10 hours. Once you can wear light weights without any discomfort, you can increase the weight of your ear weights and repeat the process. Some weights can even be worn through eyelets, saddles, or earskins to help more evenly distribute the weight and alleviate some of the pull on your lobes.
If at any point you feel pain, stop and switch out your weights with plugs. Weights are not meant to be worn the whole day, every day, especially with heavier weights. The reason is twofold;
- First off, it's good to give your ears a rest. As we mentioned, weights can put uneven pressure on your lobes. Too heavy a weight worn for too long can thin the bottom part of your lobe, and in very extreme cases this could hinder further stretching, and in very extreme cases, even cut off blood circulation.
- Secondly, because lighter weights are not likely to stretch your ears, your lobes could shrink a little over time. Rotate out weights with your size of plugs or eyelets throughout the week to ensure you stay at your ideal size.
We know this can sound a little intimidating, but wearing those heavier styles can be done. The key is patience and training your lobes. As always, listen to your body. If anything hurts, stop and allow your lobes time to heal.
How Heavy Are Ear Weights?
As their name implies, ear weights can be heavy! At their lightest, they can be around 5 grams, and go upwards of 100 or even 200 grams for some exceptionally hefty ones. To make it easier to find what you need, we have split our ear weights by weight on our site, bodyartforms.com. Each product will also include the minimum gauge size you need to be at to wear the weights and the weight of each piece. We understand that it can be hard to visualize how much a piece weighs, so we’ve made this handy chart that compares ear weights to other objects.
Ear Weight Type |
Weight |
Similar Weight To |
Light |
5g-15g |
Pen (around 12g) |
Medium |
16g-25g |
Sunglasses (around 22g) |
Heavy |
26g-40g |
Smallest Jojoba Oil we sell (almost 38g) |
Extra Heavy |
More than 40g+ |
Smart watch (around 59g) |
We love ear weights! They’re gorgeous and are an amazing way to express your style. We have tons of beautiful designs on our site bodyartforms.com.
SHOP OUR COLLECTION OF EAR WEIGHTS HERE
We hope this was informative and helpful! As always, please remember to follow us on our socials @Bodyartforms!