What DAILI makes, and who it is for

DAILI makes the small metal that goes through a healed hole, and has done since 2016. Six shelves: the nose, the pierced ear, the child's ear, the neck, the navel and brow, and the wrist and ankle. What holds them together is not a look but a decision: every card starts with the metal, the gauge and the millimetres, because those are the three things a photograph is worst at settling and the three that decide whether a piece can actually be worn.

The back of the piece

Everything in this range is decided at the end nobody photographs. A stone in four claws is a stone in four claws, and at these prices nobody is claiming otherwise; what separates one piece from the next is behind the ear or inside the nostril: a flat disc with nothing standing off it, a thread that goes home and stays, a pin bent just enough to hold its end, an L-shaped post that turns under a rim. That is where the range concentrates, and it is why so much of it is 20G and 18G titanium and 316L steel rather than something softer that would take a prettier polish.

It is also why the sets exist. Nobody can tell from a photograph whether they will get on with an L-shaped post or push one out on a towel by Thursday, so the nose shelf sells boxes of six to twelve that mix the shapes and often two gauges. A fortnight answers the question, the seven you do not wear cost less than the one you got wrong, and the spares in a tin are what keep a piercing open when a stud goes down a plughole.

What we make

The nose shelf is the biggest: studs on L-shaped, corkscrew and bone posts, hinged hoops from seven to ten millimetres, horseshoe barbells that unscrew at both ends and can be turned up into a septum, at 20G, 18G and 16G in titanium and 316L surgical steel. The ear shelf holds the flat backs and threadless studs, the screw backs, the small hinged hoops and huggies, and one cuff that needs no hole; the metals there run to 925 sterling silver as well. The children's shelf is narrow on purpose: 20G screw backs and flat backs, fronts of five and six millimetres, in boxes of five to twelve pairs. The neck shelf is thin twist chains at sixteen, eighteen and twenty-two inches with layered sets on one clasp. Navel bars are 14G and curved; brow and rook bars are 16G. The wrist shelf is adjustable chains, a hand chain and two anklets.

Where a piece is sold in gold, the gold is 14K plating over the metal the card names, and the card names both. That is a description of how the piece is made, not a hedge: plating gives you the colour at a chain price, and it wears where it is rubbed, which on a nose stud is nowhere in particular and on a clasp is exactly where you would expect.

Who it is for

You, if you already have the hole. Almost nobody arrives at a catalogue like this one out of curiosity: they arrive because a helix has been sore for a fortnight and the clutch is the reason, because a nostril stud keeps ending up in the sink, because a child's ears were done in August and the first pair has already been lost twice. The pages are written for that arrival, so the gauge sits at the top of every card and the stone further down.

The people who decide these things appear on the front page as four decisions rather than four names: the metal each shelf is cut from, how a piece closes, what a box holds, and who reads the letters when one of those is wrong on a page. There are no portraits, because a portrait on a page like this is a stock photograph, and no head count, because the count would be a story.

What we will and will not say

A card describes a piece: the metal it is sold as, the plating over it, the gauge, the millimetres, the way it closes, what is in the box. What it will do on your skin is not something a shop can know, and this one does not guess. The words that arrive printed on jewellery packets in this category, hypoallergenic, nickel-free, lead-free, are the manufacturer's and stay the manufacturer's; where a page raises the question, it links the American Academy of Dermatology on nickel, the Association of Professional Piercers on what a fresh piercing needs, the American Academy of Pediatrics on children's ears, the NHS on a piercing that has gone wrong, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission on lead in children's products.

The one checkable thing we state about ourselves is the year, 2016. Everything else worth knowing about a piece is on its card, and how the figures on those cards are kept current is set out on how we update the catalogue.