EARRINGS FOR MEN.

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 250, 22 October 1928, Page 6

EARRINGS FOR MEN.

The American woman, and no doubt the woman of many other countries, is going in with enthusiasm for ear piercing and earring wearing. But not only woman. A New York man who lately returned to his native hamlet from Paris writes r " T A mcs " to sa >" that in France he observed that , both sexes were submitting to the operation. lu Holland many men, he said, wore earrings; it was quite an ordinary thing; and of course in the South of Europe the gold rin<r in the ear is a common masculine adornment. "One can notice,' he said, "that there are lots of piercedcar men in New York."

The spread of this fashion for men opens up some picturesque possibilities. The Maori sets us an example; the old men's greenstone pendant in one ear and the shark's tooth in the other is quite an artistic arrangement. But earring wearing is a British custom of ancient lineage. In our time the veteran Devon and Kentish sailor and the Cornishman, too, and eke the Manx sailor, is fond of the gold or silver ear hangings. I remember one fine old beringed sailor man who hailed from a Devon port; he was master of various sailing vessels trading out of Auckland to the South Sea Islands. He wore a pair of big gold earrings. They gave a "Treasure-Island" finish to his weather-browned, clean-shaven face. Last time I saw old Jack—many a year ago—he had just come back to Auckland as a mate of an Island schooner. His ear lobes were bare, and I asked him what had become of the rings. "Oh," he said, "a lady down in Tonga took a" fancy to them and I sold them to her."

There was another old hand, this time an ex-captain of colonial forces down Opotiki way, a tail, white-whiskered man of Cumberland, the North Country accent still strong on his tongue, though he had been a colonial bushman and scout and farmer for sixty years, and he had a Maori wife. His ears were pierced, but he wore no rings. The reason why he told me. It waa back in 1865, when he and some of his comrades were afflicted with a kind of sandy blight in the eyes as the result-of exposure to a hard gale on the Opotiki sandhills. "We had our ears pierced as a cure for blindness," he said, "and it put us right. Earrings? No, leave all that sort of thing to the minus!," HTANGIWAI,