EVERU Ball Stud Earrings

Six sizes of the same pair is a strange-looking catalogue entry until you hold a ruler to a lobe. Three millimetres reads as a full stop. Four is the size most people mean by "small silver studs". Six is the one that is visible across a room without announcing itself. Eight and ten are deliberate. The post is ten millimetres long on all of them, which is enough for an ordinary lobe and short enough that it does not disappear into a thick one, and every size has the same butterfly back.

A plain ball is also the pair that survives the most. There is no stone to fall out of a setting, no prong to catch on a jumper, nothing to hang and pull at the front of the piercing. It is the pair people buy for a first hole after the piercing has healed, for a second hole higher on the ear where a smaller ball is better, and for a work drawer where one pair has to go with everything. What goes wrong, when something does, is the back, and backs are the cheapest thing in this catalogue to replace.