The new ECO FASHION...lovely, light, and beautifully natural tagua nut earrings made by fair trade jewelry cooperatives in Colombia.

The tagua nuts used to make these earrings are acquired from strictly controlled environments, making sure that sufficient seeds are left to perpetuate the plants.

WHAT IS TAGUA / The Ivory-Nut Palm Tree?

Tagua / The Ivory Nut Palm Tree comes from the Greek Phytelephas Aequatorialis, meaning literally "elephant plant from the equatorial region" between Colombia, Ecuador, and the Amazon Basin, where this palm is native. Female palms bear clusters of large, brown fruits, each studded with numerous woody pointed horns, and containing six or more large seeds, called "taguas" by the local natives along the Napo river. The endosperm of immature seeds, is pulpy and sweet, and is food for people and animals from the region. Mature, dry seeds get hard with time, and become so hard that it requires a hacksaw to cut one in half.

Before the invention of plastics, and when ivory had become scarce, tagua seeds had been used for hundreds of years as a raw material for luxury articles, and with the ascend of plastics, tagua was disposed of. But in the last decade tagua is living a green revolution and is valued again for its beauty, for its characteristics as a natural, biodegradable, sustainable and renewable resource, and as a way of protecting and saving the elephants and rain forests in our fragile world.