Review on Small Hoop Earrings With 18K Gold Plating For Earlobe, Cartilage, And More - Endless Hinged Surgical Steel Jewelry For Rook, Daith, Conch, Nose, Lip Piercings by Rudolph Mceachern

The gauge (G) size of earrings refers to the size of the part that goes through your ear. Most standard piercing sizes for ears are 18G. These earrings are 16G. The smaller the number, the larger the bar size, so these are a size up from standard earring sizes. The earrings I've been wearing for years have thicker bars than regular earrings, but aren't larger than these, so I'm pretty sure they're 16G (I can't remember the size because I bought them literally years and years ago.) So I had zero problem getting these into my ears.I did have problems opening them. They're so small and smooth that I couldn't pull them open with my fingers, nor pry them open with my finger nails. So what I did was take two toothpicks, center the earring on the toothpicks, and then pull the toothpicks in opposite directions. I have double piercings in each earlobe, so I did this 4 times and one of the toothpicks did break, so I had to get another. You do need to make sure that one of the toothpicks is pulling on the unlatch-able section, in order to pull it open. The little bag these come in (not the bags that the individual pairs come in, but the bag THOSE come in) is the perfect size to fit toothpicks in, so I put the toothpicks in there (along with the titanium studs I had been wearing before.)I prefer to just put earrings in my ears and forget about them, and I was able to do that with my last pair because they were made of titanium and didn't irritate my ears, so I'm hoping that will be the case with these.My earlobes are different sizes, so on one side these are less "huggy." I included a picture of the "huggier" (larger lobed) side. I think I will probably end up combining these with silver studs, with the studs being in the lower (regular placement) piercing. I do like these as huggy earrings. They're one uniform size all the way around and you can barely see the hinges, which was EXACTLY what I was looking for in huggy earrings. I definitely recommend if you're looking for something like this and the gauge size is right for you (although you CAN stretch your ears, and 16G is really not much larger than 18G.)