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The ear-piercing rite of passage: the window chair, the piercing gun, picking starter studs while your friends pressed against the glass. Claire's claims more ear piercings than any other retailer — over 100 million — and for generations of tween girls it was the reason the mall existed: bins of cheap earrings, chokers, butterfly clips, and best-friend necklaces made to be split in half.
Handmade-looking polymer clay pendants—suns with faces, crescent moons, yin-yangs—strung on hemp or black leather cord. Cheap enough to buy at a boardwalk kiosk, earthy enough to feel like you'd made it yourself. The unofficial jewelry of late-90s beach towns and mall food courts.
Removable gold and diamond teeth went from Southern hip-hop signature to national obsession, and for a couple of years the shiniest thing at the mall kiosk was dental. Nelly put the moment on wax — "Grillz" hit number one — and every yearbook from 2006 has at least one kid flashing a mouthful of metal.
A stretchy steel band of flat little links, each one snapped out and swapped for a charm — your initial, a soccer ball, a ladybug, your best friend's name. Italian charm bracelets turned a wrist into a customizable scrapbook, and for a few years in the early 2000s every girl in school was comparing links.
A thermochromic crystal that supposedly read your emotions—blue meant calm, black meant stressed—except it mostly just measured how cold your hands were. The stone changed color with finger temperature, not feelings, but that didn't stop every kid from testing one against its color chart and knowing, deep down, it was a scam.
Stretchy bracelets of round semi-precious stone beads, each color supposedly granting something—happiness, luck, smarts, money—according to the little card on the rack. Stacked a dozen deep on every late-90s wrist, powers pending.
The dress-up board game where you spun to collect plastic jewelry in your color — earrings, necklace, bracelet, ring, and the crown. Win by wearing a full matching set and the tiara, but if you got stuck holding the black ring, you couldn't win at all.