Maria Tash

If you want the piercing and the jewellery treated as one decision, it tends to be money well spent. Maria Tash's piercers study the shape of your ear and the final angle a piece will sit at, which is the difference between an earring that simply hangs and one that looks intentional. Think of it as paying for placement expertise as much as for the gold itself.

Because it is genuinely fine jewellery rather than fashion jewellery. The pieces are 18k gold and set with real diamonds rather than plating and crystal, and Maria Tash refined the construction itself, including a notched invisible set that beds the stone below the crown. You are paying for materials and a level of finishing that body jewellery historically did not bother with.

It is the idea that gave the brand its language. Maria Tash coined the term Curated Ear to describe an ear pierced with fashionable intention, composed under the direction of piercing experts rather than added to at random. In practice it means planning placements and pieces together so the whole ear reads as one designed composition.

It is one of the construction tweaks Maria Tash introduced to make pieces fit the wearer better. She modified the standard backing into a threaded style, which screws in to sit more securely and snugly than a generic push-back. Some wearers find it fiddly to change at first, so it is worth having your piercer show you the motion before you swap pieces at home.

The starting point is the opposite. Maria Tash grew out of fine jewellery design and brought that sensibility to piercing, where most studios start from the piercing and treat the jewellery as an afterthought. The result is smaller, more subtle pieces than the heavy punk-style hardware that was common when Tash began in the early 1990s.

The brand began as a single New York studio and has since expanded globally. There is the New York flagship that opened in 2004, plus permanent locations including Liberty London, Harrods, Rome, Dublin and Dubai. Buying in person also lets a piercer plan placement for your specific ear, which is much of the point of the brand.

The brand is named for its founder, Maria Tash, born Maria Tashjian in West Islip, New York. She opened her first studio, Venus Modern Body Art, in Manhattan's East Village in 1993, originally specialising in navel piercings and jewellery. Over time the shop became known for ear styles and eventually took her own name.

It traces back to 1993 in New York City, beginning as a body-art studio rather than a fine jewellery house. The international store line launched with a New York flagship in 2004, and the global luxury expansion really began in 2016 with a shop at Liberty London. The brand essentially carried piercing culture upmarket as it grew.

Yes, and it has helped cement the brand's reputation for the curated, stacked-ear look. Maria Tash designs have been worn by Hailey Bieber, Rihanna, Ashley Graham and Queen Rania, among others. That visibility is part of why the multi-piercing aesthetic the brand champions became so widely copied.

Refined and deliberately restrained. Tash's pieces are typically smaller and more subtle than the chunky hardware that defined early-1990s piercing, favouring delicate gold and precisely set diamonds. The aesthetic is closer to fine jewellery you happen to wear in a piercing than to traditional body jewellery.