The Best Gold Hoop Earrings

I would like to have a word with the woman who bought her first pair of gold hoops in 1988 convinced that the bigger the loop, the more grown up she’d look walking into a room. She was wrong about the room. She was right about the hoops, which is more than I can say for most things I believed that year.

We’ve got an ongoing disagreement on this that never resolves and I’ve stopped expecting it to. One of us thinks a hoop only counts if you can hear it, a proper substantial thing with some swing and some weight, the kind that announces you’re leaving before you’ve left. Another one of us wants something so small and close to the ear it barely registers as a hoop at all, more of a suggestion, the kind you could wear to a funeral without anyone raising an eyebrow.

We’ve had this argument for years. Nobody’s switched sides. I suspect that’s the actual point of the disagreement, not resolving it but having it.

What nobody argues about is the backs. A hoop that closes with a proper hinge, one that clicks shut with something like intention, earns its keep in a way a friction post never will. I lost one of the friction kind at a wedding in October, spent forty minutes on my hands and knees under a table in a dress that was not built for hands and knees, and found it eventually inside my own shoe, which is somehow worse than not finding it at all.

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The mirror check on these is its own small ritual. You put them in, you turn your head one way, then the other, and you’re not really checking if they suit you, you’re checking if they still suit you, which after forty years of wearing some version of a hoop is a slightly different question.

My sister saw a pair I’d just bought and said “well, those are certainly gold,” which from her is not a compliment, it’s a diagnosis. She was talking about the ones that read completely different in flash photos than they do under office lighting, warm and rich in a photo, then almost brassy under the fluorescents by the printer, which nobody warns you about and which I now check for before I buy anything.

The gamble pick is the extra large ones, the kind that catch on your collar and your phone call and occasionally your own hair. They look fantastic on exactly the right person walking into exactly the right room. On the wrong day they look like you’re wearing a costume piece from a school play about ancient Rome. I own a pair. I wear them maybe six times a year. Worth it, those six times.