EVERU silver, measured in millimetres before it is described in adjectives

Every buying button on this site opens the piece you were looking at, in the stone or the size you chose, at our retail partner. That is where the payment, the delivery and any exchange happen, and the price you see there is the price you pay.

If you would rather see the whole range at once, the button at the foot of every page opens the catalogue rather than a single piece.

Hold a ruler against your own lobe in a mirror and read the number. Between four and eight millimetres is where most ears land: four sits like a full stop, six reads clearly across a room, eight is the largest most people wear to work. Three millimetres is a second hole or a first pair for a child, and ten is a decision rather than a default.

If you already own a pair you like, measure that instead. A stud is one number wide and there is nothing else to get wrong.

The posts, backs and settings are 925 sterling silver, which means an alloy of 92.5 per cent silver, the same claim the number and the word make. The Federal Trade Commission defines both for the trade, and that is why the wording on every card here is the same wording.

One line is different and it says so: the gold huggies are 14k gold filled, a bonded layer of gold over a base metal rather than solid gold, and the cross pendant carries a plated white surface over its silver.

Our product data says these pieces are made without nickel, lead or cadmium, and nickel is the metal most people react to, the American Academy of Dermatology puts it above eighteen per cent of people in North America and names earrings among the biggest culprits. Their own advice lists pure sterling silver among the metals to choose.

What we cannot do is tell you your skin will be fine. Somebody can react to a metal that is not nickel, and a piercing that has been sore for a week is a question for a board-certified dermatologist rather than for a product page.

Yes, and so does every sterling piece ever made. Tarnish is a reaction between silver and sulphur in the air. It is a surface film rather than damage, and the cloth in the box takes it off in straight strokes.

A pair worn every day barely darkens, because skin polishes it. A pendant kept in a drawer for a year goes grey first at the back where nothing touches it. Storing each piece in its own bag with the air pressed out is the whole of the maintenance.

The modern list the American jewellery trade keeps: garnet, amethyst, aquamarine, a clear stone for April, emerald, alexandrite, ruby, peridot, sapphire, tourmaline, citrine and blue topaz. Both the cross pendant and the heart bracelet come one to a month, so a birthday is a colour rather than a compromise.

Several months carry more than one stone on that list. June and December are the two where ours differs from the first name on it, and on both the page says which stone is actually in the piece.

The cross pendant hangs on 17.7 inches with a two-inch extender, and the infinity pendant on 18.7 inches. Seventeen and a half sits in the hollow of the throat on most adults. The extender drops it to the collarbone, which is where a pendant shows over a crew neck instead of hiding behind it.

For a bracelet, measure the wrist and add half an inch. A 6.9-inch chain with a 1.57-inch extender fits wrists between about six and eight inches.

Every piece ships in a box with a polishing cloth, which is the same thing we would tell you to buy anyway. It means a birthday present does not need wrapping paper and a second trip.

The one thing to check before you order is the month: a birthstone piece is a different item for each stone, so the month you pick at the till is the month that arrives.