Pierced ears fashionable

[Newengland student]

I remember one girl in my 1st grade class with pierced ears, most likely done by the needle and cork method based on what she wore for earrings. No one really paid much attention to her ears then. That was back in 1970-1. I would say that pierced ears for young girls started to become popular in the Northeast US around 1975 or so, since that is when I remember many of my sixth grade classmates started wearing earrings (just about every girl got her ears pierced with small gold-ball earrings then).
The first time I saw anyone with a double-pierced ear was in 1977, when one girl in my class had her left ear pierced again. It looked strange to me at that time to see 2 earrings in one ear! Soon after another girl had both ears pierced for a second time, but it really didn't become popular in my school right away, I didn't notice too many other girls with "extra" earrings until the next year and triple-piercing wasn't common until a few years later and even then not many girls did it.

[uri]

I remember when I was 14, in 79 my teacher mentioned "girls with three earrings" - that is, with two earrings in one ear and one in the other. in was new back then.

But it surprises me to see six-grade ear piecing came to New England in 77, just like my school - always thught we were ten years behind America.

And I remember in 87, seeing a group of kids from Eilat - a town on the red sea, at the south end of Israel, fifth or sixth grade, and the boys had earrings! not just little ones, huge hoops hanging from their left ear! but one ear only. it was a school trip, and there were quite a few. It's a very special town - a tourist resort. The young boys there were more daring.

[GP]

I don't know what part of New England 'New England Student' is talking about, but the popularity of pierced ears certainly did not hit all of New England at the same time. In Massachusetts and Connecticut, pierced ears suddenly became very popular for high school girls (ages 14 - 18) about 1966 and 1967. I'm not sure about Rhode Island. A year or two later girls in seventh and eighth grade (12 and 13 years old) were getting their ears pierced. Then it did not take long for pierced ears to become acceptable for young girls of all ages. The three northern New England states (Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont) were much more rural than the southern three states back then and it was normal that fashions in those states were a few years behind the three southern states.

[erie910]

As I recall, the trend hit the east coast of the U.S. in the mid-1960's. Before the mid-1960's, it was rare to see women with pierced ears, although there were some women and girls whose cultural heritages included piercing of girls' ears at an early age. I do remember seeing a class of fairly young girls, perhaps 3rd or 4th grade, all in school uniform and all wearing identical pierced earrings. The trend caught on with high school girls, who pierced each others' ears using an ice cube to numb the earlobe and then pushing a needle through the ear into the ice cube. A number of girls in my high school had their ears pierced in this way, using a threaded needle, leaving the threads in until the holes healed.

By the time that I was in college in the late 1960's, most girls had pierced ears. One student at the college I attended had her ears pierced about halfway between her lobes and the tops of her ears, with no earrings in her earlobes.

The first multiple piercing that I remember was in the late 1960's in New York, where I saw a woman with triple piercings, with successively smaller hoops in each hole. Stunning.

Of course, the trend has continued over the years, with more and more multiple piercings becoming common, and with the age of the first ear piercing becoming younger and younger. And the trend has extended to boys and men.

[Guest]

From Denmark

I saw the first pierced ears,in the first part of the 60 on only a few girls, it really first start in the 70, where the most females got the ears pierced.

Today have 99 % of the females pierced ears and nearly all teenagers have multi-pierced ears.