Sarah & Sebastian’s Ear Alchemy makes piercing a pleasure
It used to involve a painful – and sometimes traumatic – trip to the local chemist, but this Australian jewellery label is turning ear piercing into a luxury experience.
With its undulating ridges, soft curves and hidden alcoves, the human ear has been a source of fascination for millennia. We’ve punctured, pinned, mutilated and adorned our auricles across time and culture to keep up with fashion trends, rebel against social norms, honour ancient traditions, and even attempt to ward off demonic spirits. Over the years, our attitude towards body piercing for adornment – particularly in the West – has alternated between outrage and acceptance.
In the 1940s the practice of having one’s ears pierced was considered vulgar and indecorous by Britain’s well-to-do. That was until the late Queen Elizabeth II debuted a set of freshly pierced lobes ahead of her wedding and single-handedly killed off the once popular clip-on.
Fast forward a few decades to the punk era and piercing had moved beyond the lobe to basically any body part that an earring – or a safety pin – could theoretically hang from.
Having grown up in the noughties during a time when pop starlets and emo bands began sporting rings and studs everywhere from their bellybuttons to their eyebrows, Sarah & Sebastian co-founder Sarah Munro saw first-hand piercing’s evolution from taboo subculture to mainstream. While infant ear piercing is common in South America and India, a trip to the local chemist after school for a lobe impaling has become a pubescent rite of passage for Australian women.
“I wasn’t allowed [ear piercings] until I was 12, and I headed down to the chemist and it was like, ‘here you go’,” Munro recalls. “One (piercing) was crooked, but we’ve fixed it since. And then I also went and had my nose pierced, but that one got removed very quickly by my parents. That was not okay.”
Perhaps it was Munro’s wonky piercing that subconsciously sparked the inspiration for what would become her very first piece under the Sarah & Sebastian jewellery label, which she co-founded with Robert Grynkofki in 2012.
The pair, who were once married, still run the business together, with Munro’s creative flair and Grynkofki’s experience in industrial design and goldsmithing proving a formidable combination.
“I was working in retail at Scanlan Theodore and making things at night in my apartment,” Munro recounts. With no experience in stone-setting, the then Bondi-based design graduate was limited to making simple gold pieces, a departure from the prevailing trend of the time. “There were a lot of crystals around,” she muses.
One day she went to work wearing one of her first designs – a pair of mismatched gold stud earrings – and their asymmetric simplicity proved a source of both confusion and delight. “People would say to me ‘Oh, your earrings are broken; they’re mismatched’,” she says. “That set the foundation and the tone for the brand; we wanted to do things differently.”
A decade on, those Line Earrings remain a core design in the Sarah & Sebastian product stable, but from a business perspective much has changed. The company recently appointed a chief executive, former investment banker Amelia Fincher, whose reputation for turning Australian brands into retail powerhouses has made her a formidable industry force.
The appointment came at the perfect time for Munro and Grynkofki, who were at this point trying to manage both the creative direction and back end of their burgeoning Sydney-based business.
“It gets to a point where it gets so big and you just don’t have that knowledge or experience to make the right decisions,” Munro says. “It keeps you awake at night thinking, should we open this store? Are we making the right decisions? And it got to the point where I didn’t want to do admin. You wear all these hats. It’s nice that I can go back to doing creative and everything I love.”
For Munro, a passionate diver who has had a strong affinity for the ocean since childhood, this includes her work on The Xanthe Project, an initiative the brand launched last year to support ocean conservation projects. “If ever I get an opportunity to speak about it, I do, and I think that just naturally comes from spending so much time in the ocean,” she says. “I think anything that we can do to bring awareness to ocean conservation is something that we’re always looking to do.”
Under Fincher’s direction, the brand is also firmly focused on expanding its store network, which currently includes seven throughout Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne, with flagships in Melbourne and Perth designed by Kelvin Ho set to open over the next six months.
The store openings are enabling the brand to further develop one of its most exciting new growth areas: ear piercing, or to be precise, Ear Alchemy. It began offering ear piercing as a service at Mecca’s four-level Sydney store in late 2020. Soon after, it opened a dedicated in-store piercing lab at its Paddington boutique, and since then the business has seen a 60 per cent year-on-year growth in this area.
Munro and her team are now working to further position the brand as Australia’s premier destination for elevated, luxury piercing experiences. This year they recruited another of fashion’s heavy hitters, Tamila Purvis, to further develop the Ear Alchemy offering.
Having launched her own jewellery brand, Maniamania, around the same time as Munro, the former stylist is well versed in running a jewellery business, but it’s her skill with a needle that led to the new role. Purvis trained under Andre Meyer, one of the world’s foremost authorities on body piercing, and has become Australia’s go-to for beautifully curated ears. But it’s not just aesthetics, she explains, that has fuelled the demand for her work, but her holistic approach, and in recent months she and Munro have developed a thorough after-care and wellness protocol as part of the Sarah & Sebastian Ear Alchemy service, with clients receiving lifestyle advice to accelerate the healing process.
It’s only when you step inside one of Sarah & Sebastian’s Ear Alchemy “labs” that you truly appreciate this unique approach to piercing. The brand’s most recent addition, at Sydney’s Strand Arcade, looks more concept store than piercing studio. Two low, geometric seats are the only furniture in the small consultation space, which features a single mirrored glass wall lined by illuminated rows of Perspex popsicle sticks.
I’m told the correct name for the specially designed transparent sticks, which on closer inspection are adorned with a single stud or hoop from the brand’s platinum and 18 carat gold earring collection, is “piercing wands”. These, Purvis explains, can be held over the ear during consultations to give clients an idea of how their auricle constellations will look.
“We speak to the client about their lifestyle, then we’ll take a look at their facial features and ear anatomy to decide where to suggest the perfect earrings for them,” Purvis explains as we sit in the brand-new space ahead of its official opening the following day. Having studied my ear’s composition and existing piercings, she holds a bunch of Perspex wands around my ear and eventually proposes a stud in my upper helix. I tell her I like opals, and she suggests a delicate stud with three small stones.
I’m offered water infused with a herbal wellness elixir from wellness brand Orchard St, before Purvis advises me on the potential healing timeline of my chosen location (areas with cartilage can take up to nine months) and recommended after-care protocol. I’m then guided into the piercing room, which features a very comfortable leather reclining chair, and the procedure begins. “We’ve come a long way since the days of the piercing gun at the chemist,” she says. “We use a single-use sterile needle, and it’s relatively painless.”
I take a deep breath and when I exhale, I feel a hot sensation as Purvis penetrates my helix with the needle. The experience is very calm and almost pleasant, and as the internally threaded stud is screwed in I’m hit by an intense episode of déjà vu. Purvis gives me a wry smile. “It’s the dopamine,” she muses. And it’s at that moment I’m convinced that the days of the chemist-wielding gun show are well and truly numbered.
This story appears in the November issue of WISH Magazine, out Friday.
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