Bug Bling

Looking for a foolproof way to horrify your mother and drive away your significant other? Consider giving them each one of Utah-based fashion designer Jared Gold’s newest works: a live insect brooch. Gold recently released a line of accessories consisting of live Madagascar cockroaches embedded with colorful crystals and outfitted with leashes that can be attached to a person’s clothing. Each bejeweled roach sells for $80 and comes with an instruction manual on how to clean and feed it (they like bananas, apparently). One caveat—well, OK, there’s lots of caveats but this one is really important: Entomologist Shripat Kamble of the University of Nebraska, Lincoln tells the journal Science that “hissing cockroaches secrete certain irritants a lot of people are allergic to.” Still enticed? Yeah, that’s what we thought. —Nicole Dyer