Posted on November 4, 2018 by A.J. O’Connell
Back in February, I wrote about my earring quest, and how I’d tried a bunch of different hacks to wear my earrings again. I tried everything from Vaseline-coated earring posts (didn’t work for me) to stainless steel hooks (mostly worked). The experiment was mostly unsatisfying; I was dealing with two problems — skin that had gotten sensitive and an earring hole that had healed up wrong at some point. I was going to head to the piercer for help, but life got in the way, and I mostly forgot about the experiment.
Then I got a message from Jackie Burke, the founder of Tini Lux, a company that makes only hypoallergenic earrings.
What is Tini Lux and what are hypoallergenic earrings?
Burke, a systems engineer, founded Tini Lux in 2017 after facing many of the same issues I had faced with my own ears.
“I stopped wearing earrings around 2008/2009 after about 10 years of having my ears pierced because I started developing the most painful reactions after a few minutes of wearing them,” she said. “Around 2015, earrings started being really popular with all the fashion bloggers I followed, so I really wanted to figure out how I could start wearing them again.”
Burke tried several pairs labeled “hypoallergenic” or “nickel free,” and tried all the earring hacks I tried earlier this year — putting clear nail polish on the posts, for example — but nothing worked. Undeterred, she kept researching.
“One day I was deep into the pages of Google and discovered a site selling some very simple, utilitarian studs made with titanium that promised to be totally safe. I gave them a try and was SO excited that they didn’t cause any irritation,” said Burke. She wanted to buy more, but could find nothing besides studs and some very home-made looking pairs.
That was when she decided to design her own biocompatible earrings.
Burke’s earrings are made only of titanium and niobium, two non-reactive metals that typically don’t react with the human body. (There are some people with extreme metal sensitivities who do experience issues with titanium, but such reactions are rare. One…
