Small wooden earrings with stone and gold-colored metal

5 cm drop earrings that only move at the bottom

The upper half of the pair sits flat against the lobe. A round black disc with a gold-finish rim opens the line, and a rosette pressed into the face of that disc holds a small grey stone. Nothing up there swings. The movement starts lower down, once the black bar has closed off the fixed section and handed the weight over to a single gold-finish ring. Across the full 5 cm drop, that split between a still top and a loose lower half is what you notice when you turn your head. The same split runs through most of the pairs in our range of shapes that hang free below the lobe.

One ring carries the whole lower piece

The half-moon hooks onto that ring and nothing else, so it can spin on its own axis, tilt forward and swing back. From the front it looks still. In three-quarter view it never quite settles. The ring is also the part under strain, which is worth remembering when you take them off.

A faceted cabochon between wood and black

The oval cabochon sits in a gold-finish setting with a beaded edge, and its facets catch the light that the black surfaces and the wood keep flat. Grey, brown and black stay within a narrow tonal range, so the pair relies on contrast of surface rather than of colour. If you'd rather have one continuous outline than a stack of separate pieces, look at the shapes that close in one continuous curve.

Wood to the outside, black to the inside

The half-moon is split down the middle: one half is natural wood with the grain showing, the other a flat black panel. The two halves swap places from one earring to the other. That is what tells you they were drawn as a pair, since the wood always falls towards the outer edge of the face and the black sits nearer the neck.

What makes up the 5 cm pair

Taking them off at the end of the day

Hold the black disc, not the half-moon, when you slide off the butterfly back: that way the ring is never pulled. Lay them down where nothing heavier or harder can sit on top of them, because the faceted surface scratches far more easily than the wood does. Run a dry cloth along the beaded edge to lift the dust that collects in its grooves.